The Sagittarius Dwarf Galaxy is a satellite of the Milky Way, about 70,000 light years from Earth and in a trajectory that has it currently passing over the Milky Way’s galactic poles; i.e., perpendicular to the galactic plane. What’s intriguing about this satellite is that its path takes it through the plane of our galaxy multiple times in the past, a passage whose effects may still be traceable today. A team of scientists led by Teresa Antoja (Universitat de Barcelona) is now using Gaia data to trace evidence of its effects between 300 and 900 million years ago.
Image: The Sagittarius dwarf galaxy, a small satellite of the Milky Way that is leaving a stream of stars behind as an effect of our Galaxy’s gravitational tug, is visible as an elongated feature below the Galactic centre and pointing in the downwards direction in the all-sky map of the density of stars observed by ESA’s Gaia mission between July 2014 to May 2016. Credit: ESA/Gaia/DPAC.
This story gets my attention because of my interest in the Gaia data and the uses to which they can be put. We just looked at interstellar interloper ‘Oumuamua and saw preliminary work on tracing it back to a parent star. No origin could be determined, but the selection of early candidates was an indication of an evolving method in using the Gaia dataset, which will expand again with the 2021 release. The Sagittarius Dwarf galaxy compels a different method, and we’ll be seeing quite a few new investigations with methods of their own growing out of this attempt to begin a three-dimensional map of the Milky Way. A kinematic census of over one billion stars will come out of Gaia.
A billion stars represents less than 1 percent of the galactic population, so you can see how far we have to go, but we’re already finding innovative ways to put the Gaia data to use, as witness Antoja’s new paper in Nature. As we saw in ‘Oumuamua’s Origin: A Work in Progress, Gaia uses astrometric methods to measure not just the position but the velocity of stars on the plane of the sky. We also get a subset of a few million stars for which the mission will include radial velocity, producing stellar motion in a three-dimensional ‘phase space.’
From the Antoja paper:
By exploring the phase space of more than 6 million stars (positions and velocities) in the disk of the Galaxy in the first kiloparsecs around the Sun from the Gaia Data Release 2 (DR2, see Methods), we find that certain phase space projections show plenty of substructures that are new and that had not been predicted by existing models. These have remained blurred until now due to the limitations on the number of stars and the precision of the previously available datasets.
Antoja’s team found that these unique data revealed an unexpected pattern when stellar positions were plotted against velocity. The pattern is a snail shell shape that emerges when plotting the stars’ altitude above or below the plane of the galaxy against their velocity in the same direction. Nothing like this had been noted before, nor could it have been without Gaia.
“At the beginning the features were very weird to us,” says Antoja. “I was a bit shocked and I thought there could be a problem with the data because the shapes are so clear. It looks like suddenly you have put the right glasses on and you see all the things that were not possible to see before.”
Image: This graph shows the altitude of stars in our Galaxy above or below the plane of the Milky Way against their velocity in the same direction, based on a simulation of a near collision that set millions of stars moving like ripples on a pond. The snail shell-like shape of the pattern reproduces a feature that was first seen in the movement of stars in the Milky Way disc using data from the second release of ESA’s Gaia mission, and interpreted as an imprint of a galactic encounter. Credit: T. Antoja et al. 2018.
Stellar motions, we are learning, produce ripples that may no longer show up in the stars’ visible distribution, but do emerge when their velocities are taken into consideration. Antoja and colleagues believe the cause of this motion was the Sagittarius Dwarf Galaxy, whose last close pass would have perturbed many stars in the Milky Way. The timing is the crux, for estimates of when the snail shell pattern began fit with the timing of the last dwarf galaxy pass.
As with the ‘Oumuamua study, we’re at the beginning of teasing out newly available information from the trove that Gaia is giving us. To firm up the connection with the Sagittarius Dwarf Galaxy, Antoja team has much to do as it moves beyond early computer modeling and analysis, but the evidence for perturbation, whatever the source, is clear. From the paper:
…an ensemble of stars will stretch out in phase space, with the range of frequencies causing a spiral shape in this projection. The detailed time evolution of stars in this toy model is described in Methods and shown in Extended Data Fig. 3. As time goes by, the spiral gets more tightly wound, and eventually, this process of phase mixing leads to a spiral that is so wound that the coarse-grained distribution appears to be smooth. The clarity of the spiral shape in the Z-VZ [vertical position and velocity] plane revealed by the Gaia DR2 data, implies that this time has not yet arrived and thus provides unique evidence that phase mixing is currently taking place in the disk of the Galaxy.
The shell-like pattern thus contains information about the distribution of matter in the Milky Way and the nature of stellar encounters. The bigger picture is that untangling the evolution of the galaxy and explaining its structure is what Gaia was designed for, a process that is now gathering momentum. We’re only beginning to see what options this mission is opening up.
The paper is Antoja et al., “A Dynamically Young and Perturbed Milky Way Disk,” Nature 561 (2018), 360-362 (abstract / preprint).
When I was a boy, I used to scan shortwave frequencies with an old Lafayette receiver in search of distant stations. When I learned that Jupiter was a radio source, my passion for radio DXing took a new turn, merging with my interest in astronomy. When I tried to log the planet’s violent outbursts, I learned with a little digging in the library that Jupiter could be detected from about 15 MHz up to 40 MHz, with the best window somewhere between 18 MHz and 28 MHz.
Called ‘decametric noise storms,’ the Jovian bursts sometimes sounded like ocean waves hitting a shore, but there were also short bursts that could be confused with local lightning, and to this day I’m not really sure whether I really heard Jupiter or not. When you’re listening for something that sounds like the ocean in the shortwave bands, it’s all too easy to think you’re hearing it in the background noise, and a little imagination makes you think you’ve found your target.
These days we can listen to just about anything on the Internet, so I’ll point you to the Io B storm of November 27, 2001, on a page that offers charts, links and an anecdotal account of a reception. Jupiter seems to have acquired a fan base among amateur radio astronomers.
But enough of Jupiter. This morning we need to talk about Saturn and the plasma waves Cassini detected moving from the planet to its rings and the moon Enceladus. These produce the distinctive sound you can hear in the YouTube video below. (If you get Centauri Dreams through email, the video isn’t going to show, but go to this link to see it). Here the recording time was compressed from 16 minutes to 28.5 seconds.
Image: New research from the up-close Grand Finale orbits of NASA’s Cassini mission shows a surprisingly powerful interaction of plasma waves moving from Saturn to its moon Enceladus. Researchers converted the recording of plasma waves into a “whooshing” audio file that we can hear — in the same way a radio translates electromagnetic waves into music. Much like air or water, plasma (the fourth state of matter) generates waves to carry energy. The recording was captured by the Radio Plasma Wave Science (RPWS) instrument Sept. 2, 2017, two weeks before Cassini was deliberately plunged into the atmosphere of Saturn. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Iowa.
The plasma wave interactions are the subject of a recent paper from lead author Ali Sulaiman (University of Iowa), who is a member of the Radio Plasma Wave Science team, RPWS being the instrument on Cassini that recorded these waves traveling on magnetic field lines.
“Enceladus is this little generator going around Saturn, and we know it is a continuous source of energy,” says Sulaiman. “Now we find that Saturn responds by launching signals in the form of plasma waves, through the circuit of magnetic field lines connecting it to Enceladus hundreds of thousands of miles away.”
Image: NASA’s Cassini spacecraft’s Grand Finale orbits found a powerful interaction of plasma waves moving from Saturn to its rings and its moon Enceladus. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech.
Enveloped by Saturn’s magnetic field, Enceladus is a geologically active place, emitting the famous geysers we’ve so often examined in Cassini imagery. The plumes of water vapor from what appears to be an inner ocean become ionized, accounting for the strong interaction between Enceladus and the planet; similar interactions occur between Saturn and its rings.
We get this information thanks to Cassini’s high-inclination Grand Finale orbits, which brought the spacecraft both to its closest approach to the cloud tops and to the inner edge of the D ring. The recording itself was captured on September 2, 2017, just two weeks before Cassini’s final plunge. Measurements of the top of the ionosphere as well as the environment around the rings showed the plasma wave interactions and underline the dynamic nature of the Saturn system.
The paper is Sulaiman et al., “Enceladus auroral hiss emissions during Cassini’s Grand Finale,” published online by Geophysical Research Letters 7 June 2018 (abstract).
Kelvin Long is a familiar face on Centauri Dreams, the author of several previous articles here and many publications in the field of interstellar studies. The creator of Project Icarus, the re-design of the Project Daedalus starship of the 1970s, Long was a co-founder of Icarus Interstellar and went on to head the Initiative for Interstellar Studies. He also served as editor of the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society during a critical period in the journal’s history, and authored Deep Space Propulsion: A Roadmap to Interstellar Flight (Springer, 2011). Today he turns his thoughts to catastrophe, and the question of what would happen to human civilization if it were reduced to a small remnant. Could we preserve the most significant treasures of our science, our culture, in the face of a devastated Earth? Exploring these ideas takes us deep into the past before turning toward what Kelvin sees as a possible solution.
by Kelvin F Long
The year is 2050. Earth is a thriving metropolis with a population exceeding 9 billion. Progress has been made in harmonising social-cultural tensions around the world and nation state war is now an infrequent event. A young child of the future steps out into the bright sunshine of a gorgeous new morning. Her day is still ahead of her as she out stretches her arms and smiles at the mellifluous call of the singing birds. But then looking up, she notices something in the distance, a long streak across the sky that is moving rapidly, and seems to be descending towards the ground. It disappears behind the horizon, and shortly later a blinding flash engulfs the world. The girl looks on stunned, eyes struggling against the light, to see the gradual build-up of a mushroom cloud that starts to reach high into the atmosphere. The impact event was hundreds of miles away, yet soon it engulfs the world in a global climate change and sends Tsunamis sweeping over coastal cities destroying all in the path. In response to oceanic earthquakes, the water becomes so big, that it pushes across the flat land masses; unrelenting mega white horses to a trampled poppy field below. One day, this will form into wedge shaped chevron deposits hundreds of feet high, composed of ocean floor micro-fossils. Within days of the event the girl will learn that billions of people are wiped out as the human civilization draws to a rapid stagnation. All infrastructure and governments are gone, and only small pockets of communities around the world survive, numbering thousands at best. She was one of the lucky ones, her small community of one hundred people survived just barely on their high mountain top position. This is fortunate for a girl named Hope.
Introduction
The future is uncertain. Whilst it is important to emphasise the positive reasons for the exploration of Earth and space, it is also important not to be in denial about the risks that really face us; for they are not insignificant. They are many and varied in type. From the potential for nation state warfare, to disease pandemics, to global climate change, to risks from above such as impact events by asteroids or comets or even the possibility alien invasion. The sure way to guarantee our survival is to follow the lead of Elon Musk and to make the human race an interplanetary species; and indeed to go further with an interstellar species. But until we have reached this point we are vulnerable. The proposal made in his article is not an alternative to the current plans for the colonization of space and the continued building up of infrastructure, but it is a complimentary pathway to increase the probability of human survival into the coming centuries. In particular, it should be taken on board that the assumptions of this project is that a possible future exists where rocket technology no longer even exists as a worst case survival scenario.
The Apkallu initiative is a proposed project to help reboot human civilization, on the assumption that some small pockets of human communities survive around the world during a global cataclysm, but all the remnants of our industrialised and developed civilization are destroyed. This includes our cities, our farms, our libraries, our infrastructure, and our transport networks; in essence the human race is thrown back to being a hunter-gatherer species and must begin again. It is named after the Sumerian sages who are said to have helped humankind establish civilization and culture and giving us the gifts of a moral code, mathematics, architecture, agriculture and all ways necessary to teach us how to become civilized. The Sumerian civilization is one of the first to appear in recorded history, which included the invention of its own writing form called Cuneiform. Before we discuss what the Apkallu initiative actually is, it is worth reminding ourselves of some essential context.
Impact Threats and Other Risks to Human Survival
We know that objects have impacted the Earth throughout its history and continue to do so today. Approximately 66 million years ago, it is believed that an impact event resulted in the Cretaceous-Tertiary (K-T) extinction. This led to devastation in the global environment and a prolonged winter which affected the photosynthesis of plants and plankton life. It also resulted in the destruction of a plethora of terrestrial organisms, including mammals, birds, insects and most famously the dinosaurs. The object, an asteroid or comet, was 10-15 km in diameter with a likely impact velocity of around 20 km/s and an associated kinetic energy of impact of around 30,000 – 1000,000 Gtons TNT equivalent, depending on the assumptions. It left an impact crater in the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, and likely created 300 feet high Tsunami’s over an impact zone of around 3,000 miles.
Another example is the Arizona Meteor crater, which was the result of a Nickel-Iron object around 50 m in size impacting the Earth 50,000 years ago. With impact velocities ranging from 2.8 – 20 km/s this would have impacted with an associated kinetic energy of 10.7 – 26.2 Mtons TNT equivalent. Today, a crater remains of the impact event, 1.2 km in diameter and over 550 feet deep.
In 1908 a comet is believed to have impacted eastern Siberia, causing a flattening of a forest 2,000 square km in size. Since no impact crater was found, it is believed that the object disintegrated at an altitude of 5 – 10 km above the ground. The estimated energy of the air burst explosion was 10 – 15 Mtons TNT equivalent; depending on the assumptions one makes.
In July 1994 a comet split into 21 fragments ranging in size up to 2 km, and impacted the upper atmosphere of Jupiter with an impact velocity of around 60 km/s. The total energy of these impacts was around 6,000 Gtons TNT equivalent creating dark red spots with some being 12,000 km in size. Had this comet impacted the Earth, it would have posed a major threat to human existence.
During late 2017 we observed the close flyby pass of an asteroid of interstellar origins named ‘Oumuamua. Much of the nature of this objects remains uncharacterised, but some sensible estimates of the maximum potential impact energy suggest 4.2 – 46.9 Gtons TNT equivalent, had it impacted the Earth.
Then in April this year that an object named Asteroid 2018 GE3 passed closed to Earth and was spotted 119,500 miles away, which is closer than the Moon, which orbits at an average distance of 238,900 miles. The object was first observed by the NASA funded Catalina Sky Survey project based at the University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory. It was first observed a mere 21 hours before the closest approach to the Earth. The object was estimated to be at least 150 – 360 ft in diameter.
How many more are out there waiting for us? No doubt some will argue that the impact risks are statistically small and we should not be concerned about them. We know there are many asteroids in our own Solar System, varying in size from 1 m up to 1,000 km. Approximately 16,000 objects have been found near Earth, but this is a small fraction of the estimated total that is out there, which varies between 1 – 2 million. Statistically, this presents a threat to human existence and life as we know it. Indeed, it is the belief of this author that impact events which can lead to global devastation of the human population may be as frequent as 1/1,000 – 1/10,000 years.
In addition to impact risks there are many other threats to human existence. This may include the implications of magnetic field reversal. Such an event occurred 41,400 years ago during the last ice age, called the Laschamp event. It caused a magnetic field reversal leading to a drop in its strength. This resulted in more cosmic rays reaching the Earth and an increased production of the isotopes Beryllium 10 and Carbon 14.
There are also the risk of enhanced solar activity such as through large scale solar flares, or the possibility of the Sun entering unstable periods in its evolution for which are current models of stellar-structure are not aware. This could be due to the passage of our Sun through the spiral density arms of the galaxy. There are the risks of nation state war or even global thermonuclear war that could drive us towards extinction, either through direct destruction or through altering the climate. There are the risks of human disease pandemic, which surely must become more probable in an increasing global population. There are the risks of human destruction of elements of the biosphere, such as pollutions of the oceans, soils, deforestation or polluting of the atmosphere. There are the risks that microbes could be introduced into our biosphere from an alien planet that is infectious to our biodiversity.
Then there is the actual risk of alien invasion, from a species set on conquering other lower species or seeking resource acquisition no matter the costs. It may be assessed that some of these are low probability. However, the fact that there are so many risks to the future survival of humankind should be a concern, and it is vital that we take a proactive approach to adaptability and survival, instead of a reactive one when such events occur.
Assumptions of a hypothetical Near-Human Extinction
Imagine a situation where human kind is nearly wiped out by some global cataclysm. This could be an impact event or one of the other risks highlighted earlier. In a worst case scenario, but one where some humans survive, we might make the following assumptions:
1. All infrastructure is destroyed, to include buildings, power utilities, city plumbing, dams, transport networks, agriculture and farming, huge portions of the plant and animal kingdom.
2. All information sources are destroyed, to include all the world libraries, computers and electronic memory. It is possible that some books will be discovered over time as communities explore the rubble remaining from the metropolis. Books would become precious beyond their current value.
3. The global climate is in turmoil and hostile, but with isolated regions of stability such that with determination survival is possible.
4. The geological, climatic, oceanic activity and effects of the cataclysm event, within weeks, months or years will gradually return towards some level of stable Earth.
5. Small pockets of humans survive around the Earth, perhaps 10s to 100s each but with the total not exceeding thousands.
Given this scenario, we can note that the surviving generation will remember the world as it was before. They will use this knowledge to teach their children. At this point knowledge is based upon direct memory. Those children will then grow up, with their parents dying off, and they will remember what their parents taught them and some of those children may even have some memories of the world before. But for the most part we are dealing here with recent history and part mythology. The grandchildren will also be born and grow up, but they will have no direct memory of the world the way it was before. At this point we are dealing with history and mythology. Within the third or fourth generation there is a risk that all knowledge will be lost, and especially if that knowledge is not captured and written down. All received knowledge then becomes both mythology and fantasy.
There are solutions to this practiced by the Native North Americans for example, which is to communicate stories verbally and also use this to impart wisdom, and those stories are accompanied by rituals. However, one cannot believe that such a method of communication does not contain significant information error propagation with each successive generation, compared to the original version.
The History of Humans on Planet Earth
In the event of a global cataclysm, assuming small pockets of human communities survive, but the majority of human civilization and associated technological infrastructure is destroyed, how can we ensure a chance at rebooting human knowledge? Indeed, is it possible that this has in fact occurred in the recent past and this is a part reason for the many Megalithic structures on Earth?
Until recently, Sumer was the earliest known civilization in the historical Mesopotamia, and is located in modern Iraq. It dates back to 3,000 B.C and was likely settled around 4,000-5,500 B.C by proto-Euphrateans or Ubaidians. The people from this era are credited for many great inventions and discoveries which led to the advance of their society. This includes in mathematics, geometry, agriculture, architecture, economics and law to name a few. One of the most famous objects discovered from this period is the Code of Hammurabi, a 2.25 m tall stone wall consisting of 282 laws, such as “an eye for an eye” and is the first legal system from the Old Babylonian period.
The Code of Hammurabi, created 1750 B.C, currently housed at the Louvre, Paris (image credit: K. F. Long)
It is important to note that in the Babylonian creation mythologies, which were written in Cuneiform, there are around a thousand lines of text on seven clay tables. The focus of this text is the creation of humankind for the service of the gods. These texts are called the Enûma Eliš, and arguably they have a clear lineage to the Judeo-Christian Bible. The Cuneiform script was scribed, using a wedge-shaped marker onto a wet clay tablet and also cylinder seals. These are small round objects typically an inch in length engraved with information. Once dried the inscription was permanent. The information preserved on tablets and seals was Cuneiform text but also contained figurative scenes or descriptions of events or objects. Such objects are breathtaking in their clarity, gorgeous in their artistic nature, and contain a wealth of information about the society, its rituals, values, business, science and technology.
Photographs of Sumerian Cylinder Seals from the Private Collection of the Author (image credit: K. F. Long)
The Holy Bible records a flood story that engulfed all of planet Earth. This is recorded in Genesis chapters 6 – 9, and the flood seems to last for around one hundred and fifty days. Other cultures have recorded similar stories. For example the Sumerian tale of Ziusudra and the Atra-Hasis also describes a global flood story that is similar to that told in Genesis. In the Sumerian story the flood lasts for seven days. An account is also told in the Epic of Gilgamesh, which is more similar to the Biblical story. Also, the Hindu mythology tells of a great flood in the Satapatha Brahmana. It is very easy to dismiss the possibility of a global flood as pure mythology, but the occurrence of a similar story in so many cultures around the world is at least suggestive that it may be a memory of an actual event which many today are regarding as mythology. Indeed, science may be catching up with the past.
Geologists and climatologists study a period in Earth’s history called the Younger Dryas, which occurred 12,900 to 11,700 years ago and saw a return to glacial conditions which temporarily reversed the gradual climatic warming after the last glacial maximum which began receding around 20,000 years ago. It led to many catastrophic effects including the decline of the Clovis culture in North America and the extinction of many megafauna which included the Mammoths; the last of which survived into the Holocene around 4,500 years ago in Africa, Europe, Asia and North America.
Illustration of the Younger Dryas period
In recent years, evidence is emerging that the Younger Dryas period may have been caused by a cometary impact event on the North American ice sheet, around 12,900 years ago. The evidence for his includes the discovery of a 10 million ton deposit of impact spherules across four continents, and the discovery of a Nano-diamond rich layer. In addition, analysis of underground soils indicates massive wildfire and abrupt ecosystem disruption on California’s Northern Channel Islands. Scientists have also discovered very high temperature impact melt products as evidence for an air burst explosion. All of this is dated to around 12,900 years ago, at the onset of the Younger Dryas. If this is proven to be correct, then a global cataclysm may indeed have occurred in our recent past. Speculating, if any advanced civilizations existed on Earth prior to this date, they may have been wiped out by this cataclysm forcing civilization to start from the beginning again.
At some point in our past we moved from a hunter-gatherer species to an agricultural-farming one, where we embraced the domestication of animals and crops. This is marked by a period called the Neolithic, and occurred around 10,200 years ago. It is considered to be the last period of the stone age and commenced the beginning of the Neolithic revolution. It ended with the emergence of the Copper and Bronze and Iron ages and our new abilities to use metals. It is remarkable that we have apparently exploded technologically and social-culturally over the last 10,000 years or so to the state where we have computers, cars, aeroplanes and communication satellites. What was it that propelled us forward over such a short space of time? Why had we not achieved this level of maturity previously? Was it the formation of a critical population density? Was it global climatic conditions? What is our tribal nature and inability to get organized? What it some other threats to our existence?
Homo sapiens in our modern form may be several hundred thousand years old. Paleolithic cave art certainly goes back to 40,000 years but may be 60,000 years if we include what is currently being claimed to be art from Neanderthal man. Evidence from the out of Africa hypothesis puts homo sapiens at around 130,000 – 180,000 years old. But there are alternative versions which claim populations emerging out of Africa as early as 350,000 years ago. Evidence for older findings includes discoveries of anatomically modern human skull fossils at Jebel Irhour in Morocco (315,000 years) and Middle Awash in Ethiopia (160,000 years). The history of human evolution is far from settled and ‘thinking man’ may be much older than we realised.
Ancient Megaliths
A story from ancient Sumeria is that of an amphibious being called Oannes (also known as Adapa) who apparently taught humankind wisdom. The story was told by Berossus in 290B.C, a Chaldean Priest in Babylon. Berossus described Oannes as having the body of a fish but underneath the figure of a man. He is said to dwell in the Persian Gulf, rising out of the waters in day time and furnishing humankind in the instruction of writing, arts and other subjects. Here are the words of Berossus:
“At first they led a somewhat wretched existence and lived without rule after the manner of beasts. But, in the first year appeared an animal endowed with human reason, named Oannes, who rose from out of the Erythian Sea, at the point where it borders Babylonia. He had the whole body of a fish, but above his fish’s head he had another head which was that of a man, and human feet emerged from beneath his fish’s tail. He had a human voice, and an image of him is preserved unto this day. He passed the day in the midst of men without taking food; he taught them the use of letters, sciences and arts of all kinds. He taught them to construct cities, to found temples, to compile laws, and explained to them the principles of geometrical knowledge. He made them distinguish the seeds of the earth, and showed them how to collect the fruits; in short he instructed them in everything which could tend to soften human manners and humanize their laws. From that time nothing material has been added by way of improvement to his instructions. And when the sun set, this being Oannes, retired again into the sea, for he was amphibious. After this there appeared other animals like Oannes.“
Whether this is pure fiction or has any resemblance to historical events does not matter, but it is this story that has given rise to the idea of building what this author is calling a ‘minilithic artefact’ under the Apkallu Initiative as will be discussed further below. As an aside it is worth noting that in his book Intelligent Life in the Universe, written with L. S. Shklovskii (Pan Books, 1977), the astronomer Carl Sagan opened a discussion on the Sumerian civilization with “I came upon a legend which more nearly fulfils some of our criteria for a genuine contact myth”.
On planet Earth we know that species rise up and fall and suffer extinction. The fossil record has shown this for many a species. There are also arguments that Homo Sapiens are not the only occurrence of intelligence on Planet Earth (see for example the recent book Other Minds by Peter Godfrey-Smith’ on the Octopus, William Collins, 2016). Why then is it not possible, in the last million years, that an earlier species of man, or other life form on Earth, could have evolved to similar levels of intelligence to that which we possess today, to include a technological level similar in extent? Such a people would predate modern recorded history, and it is at least plausible that some memory of them could be preserved in the creation mythologies of our various ancient cultures.
Many ancient Megalithic structures have been found by archaeologists around the world. This includes for example the Great Pyramid and the Great Sphinx in Giza (4,500 years old), Tiwanaku and Pumapunku in West Bolivia (3,500 years old), Stonehenge in England (5,000 years old), Machu Picchu in Peru (550 years old) to name a few. However, recently our linear understanding of human evolution from a hunter-gatherer species to an agricultural-farming one has been placed under scrutiny, by the discovery in 1996 of G?bekli Tepe, a site in the South eastern Anatolia region of Turkey, which may date back to 12,000 years old. The site demonstrates a superior knowledge of construction techniques, geometry and other disciplines and to enable its construction would have required a food surplus to exist – before the arrival of the Neolithic revolution. In addition, it is arguable that to get to a point where you can construct something like G?bekli Tepe would take thousands of years of advancement of knowledge in itself. This might suggest that the builders were 15,000 – 20,000 years old.
A potentially even older site has also been found in West Java, called Gunung Padang, which was discovered in 1914. It may be the largest megalithic site in South Eastern Asia. Radiocarbon dating puts the site at several different eras spanning 6,500 – 20,000 years ago, although the dating claims are controversial among archaeologist in Indonesia. A large structure has also been discovered beneath the surface some 15 m down and includes large chambers. This discovery, and that of G?bekli Tepe, is telling us that our linear understanding of history is in need of revision.
Interglacial Periods in Earth’s History
Given the existence of G?bekli Tepe and Gunung Padang, the idea that an earlier intelligent and advanced civilization existing on Earth is not so implausible. However, were there opportunities in Earth’s history for this to occur? An examination of climatic conditions would seem to suggest so.
During the history of Earth there have been five major ice ages, and we are currently in the Quaternary Ice Age at this time, which spans from 2.59 million years ago. Within the ice ages are sub-periods known as glacial and interglacial periods.
Recent measurements of the relative Oxygen isotope ratio in Antarctica and Greenland show the periods of glacial and interglacial periods throughout history over the last few hundred thousand years. This is a measurement of the ratio of the abundance of Oxygen with atomic mass 18 to the abundance of Oxygen with atomic mass 16 present in ice core samples, 18O/16O, where 16O is the most abundant of the naturally occurring isotopes. Ocean water is mostly comprised of H216O, in addition to smaller amounts of HD16O and H218O. The Oxygen isotope ratio is a measure of the degree to which precipitation due to water vapour condensation during warm to cold air transition, removes H218O to leave more H216O rich water vapour. This distillation process leads to any precipitation having a lower 18O/16O ratio during temperature drops. This therefore provides a reliable record of ancient water temperature changes in glacial ice cores, where temperatures much cooler than present corresponds to a period of glaciation and where temperatures much warmer than today represents an interglacial period. The Oxygen isotope ratios are therefore used as a proxy for temperature changes by climate scientists.
The Vienna Standard Mean Ocean Water (SSMOW) has a ratio of 18O/16O = 2005.2×10-6, so any changes in ice core samples will be relative to this number. The quantity that is being measured, ?18O, is a relative ratio calculated as in the units of % parts per thousand or per mil. The change in the oxygen ratio is then attributed to changes in temperature alone, assuming that the effects of salinity and ice volume are negligible. An increase of around 0.22% is then defined to be equivalent to a cooing of 1?C.
There are differences in the value of ? between the different ocean temperatures where any moisture had evaporated at the final place of precipitation. As a result the value has to be calibrated such that there are differences between say Greenland and Antarctica. This does result in some differences in the proxy temperature data based on ice core analysis, and Greenland seems to stand out, such as indicating a more dramatic Younger Dryas period (11,600 – 12,900) than other data.
An analysis of this data shows that the climate has varied cyclically throughout its history and is manifest of natural climate change. In particular what emerges out of the data are some interesting lessons about the recent history of planet Earth. Data shows the rapid oscillations of the climate temperature from the average temperature of today, indicative of glacial and interglacial periods. In particular, the data shows that during the Holocene period, beginning approximately 11,700 years before present, the temperature varied between 2-4 ?C.
It is reasonable to assume that human civilizations under development will do better when the climate is kinder. This means that the warmer it is the better civilisations will do, and the colder it is, the harder the struggles. In particular we can expect that during the conditions of a colder climate that agricultural farming will suffer, and so there will be less food to go around, which will affect both lifespan and population expansion. To support this it is worth noting that the current epoch, the last 10,000 years has been one of the longest interglacial period for at least the last quarter of a million years and it is reasonable to therefore assume that this is one of the factors which has allowed human development from the emergence of the Neolithic period coming out of the last ice age.
The data also shows that there was a large global warming period known as the Eemian around 115,000 – 130,000 years ago. The average global temperatures were around 22 – 24 ?C, compared to today where the average is around 14 ?C. Forests grew as far north as the Arctic circle at 71? latitude and North Cape in Norway Oulu in Finland. For comparison North Cape today is now a tundra, where the physical growth of plants is limited to the low temperatures and small growing seasons. Given that homo sapiens may have been here since around 300,000 years ago, this seems like a major opportunity for the development of human society from a people of hunter gatherers to one of agricultural developers and the development of a civil society.
There have been other interglacial periods that have resulted in global temperatures being either equivalent or above the average today, and the data shows temperature spikes of periods at around 200,000 years, 220,000 years, 240,000 years, 330,000 years and 410,000 years. Each of these interglacial periods will typically last at least 10,000 years.
Temperature Proxy Data Showing Opportunities for the Rise of Advanced Civilization in Recent Prehistory
The Apkallu Initiative
It is fully admitted that much of the above contains speculation, but until we have a firmer grasp of history it would be unwise to rule such possibilities out. We turn our attention then to the future and solving the problem of how to preserve human knowledge in the event of a global cataclysm such that humankind can restart again so that within centuries we mature back to similar levels of today’s technological advancement. Ultimately this is a statistical problem, in that by reducing the time of each cycle for maturing to technological capability, one improves the probability of survival. It is sensible to think of this concept as a civilization accelerator.
The Apkallu Initiative is therefore a proposal to construct a minilithic artefact (analogous to Megalithic artefacts) that can survive for a time duration exceeding 100,000 years. This duration is chosen for three principal reasons:
1. The recent ice core records suggest that within that time period there may be several opportunities (~4) where the climatic conditions are sufficiently supportive for human existence to facilitate growth beyond basic survival.
2. It approximately corresponds to four processional cycles of the Earth around the equinoxes, which typically last 25,920 years. We note that many of the ancient Megaliths seem to have been preoccupied with the measurement of the equinoxes; which may relate to lost memory of previous cataclysms.
3. It is difficult to design for an artefact that can survive longer than this, although desirable.
The artefact would be a form of archaeological-architectural device from the standpoint of future humans who uncover it. The device would be replicated perhaps 1,000 times and distributed around the seven continents of the Earth. Ideally, some could also be placed in space, on the Moon or Mars. The idea is that any future human surviving a global cataclysm that finds this artefact and studies it sufficiently, it will give them the knowledge they need to rapidly advance human civilization at an accelerated rate.
Painting illustrating future man finding the archaeological artefact (credit: K. F. Long)
The artefact would be a form of long distance communication. We have of course attempted message plaques in the past such as the Voyager Golden Record and the Pioneer Plaque. Indeed, the Code of Hammurabi from the Sumerian civilization is a form of minilithic artefact, but just specific to moral and legal codes. Another example would have been the tablets for the Biblical Ten Commandments.
There is a question of what materials to construct the artefact from. Plastics and metals will likely degrade over thousands of years. Electronic memory is not useful if it is subject to flip switching and also requires a computer interface to read it. It therefore seems sensible to construct the artefact out of stone; perhaps in a similar manner to the Sumerian Cuneiform on wet clay tablets. One of the options may be Diorite. It would perhaps be useful to depict both logograms, with syllabic and alphabetic elements, as well as phonetics and even determinatives to create appropriate semantic descriptions.
There is a question of what information should the artefact contain. It should contain the foundation knowledge of human civilization. This is a subjective decision. One example we might take lessons from for example was the Trivium (logic, grammar, rhetoric) and the Quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy) of the classical world. Both were considered preparation work before delving into the study of philosophy and theology. In addition to these, the artefact might contain many other disciplines of thought, such as human biology, medicine, architecture, chemistry, physics, law, history, music, language, agriculture, botany, ethics and other subjects. Experts in appropriate disciplines would need to be consulted to derive the say 12 base foundation knowledge or tenets that govern a field from which in principle all else can be derived given time.
The goal of the information content imprinted onto the artefact would be as follows:
Goal 1: The continued survival of the human species at peace.
Goal 2: The accelerated technological, social-cultural growth of human civilization from an assumed stagnated level.
Goal 3: The preservation of moral and ethical philosophy
There is also a question of what language. One approach would be to take lessons from historical artefacts which contained several languages to ensure future interpretation. This includes the Rosetta Stone (2,200 years old) which contains ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, demotic and ancient Greek. Another example is the Fuente Magna of the Americas (5,000 years old), found in Bolivia but contains both ancient Pukara and a proto-Sumerian alphabet. Another example is the Behistun inscription (2,500 years old) found in Iran, which contains three different cuneiform script languages, that of Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian.
There is also the question of the size and shape of the artefact, and although you want it big enough to find, you also want to manage the construction cost of the project. Something around 6 – 12 inches would seem a good optimum size. The exact shape would have multiple surface areas to facilitate different disciplines of knowledge. One idea is a Dodecahedron, which has 12 faces.
The proposal of the Apkallu Initiative is to form a team which then designs and leads the construction of such an artefact. This can then be reproduced and distributed to different locations around the world. Some would eventually be displayed in art galleries or museums and some will be lost to the land and sea, but the hope is that in the event of the cataclysmic scenario described above that future human will stumble across such an artefact, and after studying it, teach their community everything they need to become a civilized and socially-technologically advanced society. Currently no team has been formed, but this article is an initial invitation of interest and anyone interested can contact the web site: https://www.apkalluinitiative.com/
Our ability to become an interstellar capable species depends in the near term on our ability to survive here on Earth or in near-space. The preservation of the deep knowledge and learning of the human experience is critical to this future, if we are to continue to progress, avoid stagnation and decay or even complete extinction or avoid repeating mistakes of the past.
Finally, such a project has the potential to inspire long-term thinking among differing human societies, and so in itself may be a self-perpetuating mechanism toward social-cultural harmonization and increased global awareness of our fragility in the great Cosmos. In addition, because of its interdisciplinary nature, it has the potential to involve all of humanity on its journey, as we jointly work toward a back-up plan to ensure that humanity can survive in the millennia ahead.
The author dedicates this article to the efforts of Graham Hancock and Randall Carlson, whose significant research inspired this initiative. It was written to garner scrutiny of the idea, before deciding whether to proceed or not. Feedback is invited.
Can Andy Weir’s Artemis, the setting for his new novel of the same name, be best described as a city or a town? Or is it better to think of it, as Ioannis Kokkinidis does in the essay that follows, as a ‘polis’? The ancient Greek term carries through the centuries to inform Ioannis’ musings on Weir’s creation, as he examines Artemis, a tourist destination like no other, from a deeply international perspective. Well known for his attempt to keep the science of The Martian accurate, Weir set a high bar, one to which Artemis will invariably be compared. Ioannis Kokkinidis is a resident of Fresno, CA with an abiding interest in deep space. He holds a Master of Science in Agricultural Engineering from the Department of Natural Resources Management and Agricultural Engineering of the Agricultural University of Athens. He went on to obtain a Mastère Spécialisé Systèmes d’informations localisées pour l’aménagement des territoires (SILAT) from AgroParisTech and AgroMontpellier and a PhD in Geospatial and Environmental Analysis from Virginia Tech. Just how realistic, Ioannis asks, is Weir’s polis on the Moon?
by Ioannis Kokkinidis
Introduction
Andy Weir’s new novel, Artemis, is a heist story set on the first lunar town, named Artemis. The book has had a large number of book reviews in the press mostly dealing with its literary qualities. Reviewers though have not quite dealt with the realism of the setting, a town on the Moon named Artemis which lives off tourism, mining and through providing a base camp to space agencies (ESA and ISRO are specifically mentioned) exploring the moon. Over the years many rationales have been given to colonize the Moon. This is the only story I have read – granted I have not been able to read that much science fiction – where tourism is the primary driver of colonization. Andy Weir has said that he first created an economy of the town and then went on to write the novel. His description of a tourist dependent city though has several assumptions that, while mostly true for some American destinations, are quite odd for tourist destinations outside the US. This is an analysis by a person who comes from a country whose economy is highly dependent of tourism, has visited some 30 countries and lived in 5 of them. I am trying to keep this review as spoiler free as possible so as not to ruin the enjoyment of the book to anyone who has not read it, though I hope that those that have not read the book will be able to follow my arguments and form their own opinions. I will also admit freely that I am a biased reviewer; much as I criticize Weir for having an American bias when creating his city, I admit that I have a Greek bias.
Literary Setting
Artemis is the story of Jazz (for Jasmine) Bashara, a young Saudi born woman who has lived most of her life in Artemis and belongs to the first generation to have grown up there. She is the only narrator of the story. We spend the entire novel in her head, and most likely she qualifies as an unreliable narrator in that what she understands is not necessarily what is actually happening. She works as a porter, delivering cargo from the cargo ships to various destinations in Artemis and doing smuggling on the side. One of her clients hires her to do a heist, and following the law of unintended consequences she finds herself forced to do another job with higher stakes to save the city. I will leave the plot description at that, which generally corresponds with the blurb, so as to avoid spoiling it. In the course though of the story she experiences Artemis from a variety of viewpoints, including as a tourist to the Apollo 11 site and describes a functioning town on the Moon as she understands it. Andy Weir has created a variety of characters that, as has been noted, ticks off a large number of diversity boxes, though it also has been noted that the different people he mentions do not quite act as people of their described background do today. On the other hand, considering that the book is set decades into the future on the Moon, we cannot be certain if people will act that way then. Just like The Martian the time the book is set is not given, and while through orbital mechanics you could work out that The Martian was set in the 2030s, the only mention of time is that Star Trek is 100 years old. My sense was that this would place the setting in the 2060s though other sources on the web claim that it is the 2080s.
Andy Weir has an agreement with Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, the writers behind the pen name James S. A. Corey so that their works are set in the same Universe. The Expanse main series begins 150 years after the short story “Drive” which is about the invention of the Epstein Drive, a revolutionary type of high power high efficiency ion engine by one of the first colonists of Mars. The idea is to form a coherent future history of humanity with a strong basis on science rather than just space opera, from the third expedition to Mars to, well, I am not sure what the end game of The Expanse will be, intergalactic conflict? The Expanse can help fill some of the details in Artemis, the general Wild West type lawlessness of Artemis is what will evolve to the Ceres which, as Detective Miller comments, “has no laws, only cops”. To the best of my knowledge though we have not had published information on what is the actual extent of the collaboration between the three authors so I will be speculating here out of necessity. My critique of the novel should not be understood as dismissal of it. It is after all far easier to tear down than to build, and Weir has done an admirable job in world-building. While Artemis is not as good as the Martian I truly enjoyed Artemis and could not let it down until I finished it.
Tourism in the United States and in Europe
On the two sides of the Atlantic tourism takes very different forms. It is very well known in Europe that Americans only get two weeks of paid vacation per year –the poor for that matter get nothing- as opposed to the European norm of 4 or 5 weeks. The US is more economically polarized than Europe and a far more consumerist: What a European will spend on vacation; an American is more likely to spend on a bigger house, bigger car, bigger appliances etc. The typical American worker will take a day or two off next to a holiday and go with his family to the nearest beach/national park. They will take that one time trip to New York City/Washington DC/Disneyland/Las Vegas, college students will go on Spring Break but generally vacation is not as important as for Europeans. Andy Weir’s lunar vacation is the very American special vacation type: Rather than go to that trip to Las Vegas his vacationers go to Artemis. Since vacation is special anyway, they might as well splurge on it. For a European though some year the vacation may be special, but it is something that will happen every year. European destinations are designed so that you want to come every year, this does not seem to be the case in Artemis.
Another thing that Weir fails to understand is seasonality. Different groups of people come at different times of the year at the same destination, and the destination needs to be flexible enough to leave all satisfied. While in Greece have winter destinations like Arahova and Kaimaktsalan and city break destination like Athens which receive tourists all of the year, some 70% of tourists in Greece arrive between June and September. The tourist season goes as follows in Greece: Two weeks before Orthodox Easter is the High School senior 5 day field trip. 12th graders, accompanied by their teachers but not their parents, visit destinations such as Corfu and Rhodes in theory for educational purposes –they do visit the museums and archaeological sites- and in practice to go clubbing; to drink, sing and dance until the break of dawn or until a student gets smashed and the rest are returned to their hotel while a teacher accompanies him or her to the hospital. Next week is what we call in Greece Catholic Easter –for us Orthodox Christians it is Palm Sunday- and we see European tourists come for their break. Greek tourists join them since the next two weeks are a school holiday due to Orthodox Easter. The two weekends afterwards are the college student party trips to places such as Mykonos and Santorini, similar to American college student Spring Break. By that time it already mid-May foreign childless tourists abound. July and August, when schools are off, are the main tourist months with the peak of the peak being the first 20 days of August. After Dormition (August 15) people start returning home from vacation, school starts in Europe in late August though in Greece on September 10. We still get tourists though until the end of September. Weir’s tourist city somehow it lacks a tourist season, seasonal employees and for that matter tourist destinations beyond the Apollo 11 site.
Physical setting
General Description
Figure 1: A map of Artemis. Credit: Crown Publishing
Artemis, population at the time of the novel being 2,000 is referred as a city. Physically it is located in Tranquility Bay on the Moon some 40 km from the Apollo 11 landing site. I have an issue with the use of the term city: in Greece that a village has a population of less than 2000 inhabitants, a town 2,000-10,000 and a city of over 10,000. For this reason I use in this article the ancient Greek term polis to refer to the settlement. I believe that this term is also more appropriate than city because it also has the connotations of an independent city state rather than just an urban settlement. Artemis has the appropriate size for a small ancient Greek polis: Plato considers that the perfect size for a polis is 5040 citizens, which in his time meant free adult men, and that when it gets to 10,000 citizens it is too big. As Nikias though put it (in Thucydides’ History 7.77.7) “men make the city and not ships and walls empty of people”; which in our case I would amend to “men and women”. We do not know the demographic breakdown of Artemis, how many men versus women, what the age distribution is except that children under 6 were not allowed when Jazz moved and that at the time of the novel the minimum age is 12. Pregnant people are moved to the Earth to give birth. In The Expanse this problem has been solved, but not in Artemis. A lack of children creates very interesting problems, which I discuss later.
Using the analogy of Greece I can attempt to estimate how many tourists visit. As mentioned in 2018 we expect 30 million tourists, 70% of them (21 million) visit the four regions of the Ionian Islands, North Aegean, South Aegean and Crete which per the 2011 census are populated by 1,338,946 people. If we use a similar 15 tourists per inhabitant ratio for Artemis then it should have 30,000 tourists visiting it every year. That would make it a minor tourist destination. Can 30,000 people a year afford to spend something in the order of $100,000 to visit the moon? In view of the studies over who can afford a Virgin Galactic suborbital hop today, I think the answer is yes.
Artemis is described as a playground for rich tourists served by an underclass of workers, one of which is Jazz. Weir has rightly noted that since robots can do everything in space much cheaper than people, tourism becomes the only reason to visit space. Monetary unit of Artemis is the Soft Landed Gram or slug, which is in reality an account with the Kenyan Space Agency that is used to exchange funds on the Moon. Artemis is composed of 5 domes that have different functions: As Weir said during New York Comic Con “Armstrong is industry, Aldrin is the tourist center with casinos and hotels and stuff, Conrad is where the blue-collar folks live, the low-income people. Bean is sort of like suburban life; it’s middle-income folks. And then Shepard is where the really rich people live”.
Those who permanently live in Artemis are retirees who have moved their savings there to avoid taxation, workers in the limited industry that Artemis hosts, service employees for the tourists and Space Agency scientist. In other words Artemis is a cross between the Wild West of the western movies, Monte Carlo and McMurdo Station in Antarctica. These three functions though often clash. For example Monte Carlo is a police state; it has the highest per capita police force per its population in Europe. Somehow though in Artemis a single Mountie, Rudy Dubois, is capable of providing security that the tourists and locals need.
McMurdo station which is the main base of operations for Antarctica has on its own a population of 2,000 people mostly made of supporting crew to the scientists. Will automation in the late 21st century be such that the Moon, which is larger than Antarctica, can have a base of support smaller than that of Antarctica today? We can only guess.
Travelling to Artemis
Andy Weir has written an article where, based on the ratio of the cost of airplane fuel to ticket price for a trip he calculates that the cost of a roundtrip to Artemis will be US$70,000 in 2015 dollars. His premise is that future spaceships will have similar economics to today’s airplanes. If he was to choose passenger ferries as the economic base I am sure he would come with a different number, but I am willing to go along with his price. What I do doubt are his assumptions for the trip specifics. While it is not mentioned explicitly, all would be lunar tourists travel to the Kenya Space Center and blast off to the moon from there. We are not told of any other launching sites sending people to the moon and when one of the characters who is from Hong Kong leaves Artemis, Jazz tells her Kenyan pen pal and accomplice Kevin to track him in a way that assumes that he could only be leaving towards Kenya. The trip from Earth to the Moon and from the Moon to Earth takes 7 days each way. Why do visitors to Artemis need to fly to Kenya first rather than leave from a spaceport closer to their home? For one thing every visitor to Greece does not enter through Eleftherios Venizelos Athens International Airport and then travels to their final destination. Elefterios Venizelos airport is a hub for connections to Greece especially if you are flying a transatlantic flight or your final destination is pretty small but European tourists will often fly directly to Corfu, Mykonos, Rhodes, Heraklion, Santorini or wherever they are going, especially if they are in a low cost or charter flight. Airplanes though are not the only way to visit the Greek island, very often tourists will go by boat. While Corfu has a direct connection to Italy and the islands of the east Aegean direct boats to Turkey, the typical port of origin for a trip to Greek island is my home city Piraeus, the port of Athens. Greece has 107 inhabited islands per the 2011 census, from Piraeus you can get a boat to most. Not all ships travel at the same speed, summer visitors have the option of taking a slow boat, a fast boat or a hydrofoil, in addition to the airplane of that island has an airport with a regularly scheduled flight. Why is Kenya Space Center the only origin to passenger flights to Artemis and why are they slow 7 days trips when Apollo took 3 days other than reasons of novel plot? Shouldn’t there be fast flights to those willing to shell out the money? This is not just an issue of convenience but also of competitiveness as a tourist destination. Studies about Greek tourism get often printed on the Greek press and one of the problems we have is that we are too far away from the countries most of visitors originate compared to our competitors. For a British traveler Crete is twice the air time distance than Ibiza. I cannot guess what travel times will be when Artemis is set, but for a busy CEO who gets very limited time off work, spending two weeks to and from the destination does not seem to be wise. Then again it could be that a trip to Artemis is something like a cruise: It is the cruise ship that is the destination and the passengers just get out for day trips.
We are not told of what engine the crewed spaceships use though the Hermes on The Martian used an ion engine and in The Expanse ion engines are described as the old type used. We are not told how many passengers each ship carries. We are not told if there are specialized cargo ships that make the trip without passenger carrying bulky or heavy loads, or if the passenger ships are the only way to ship stuff. We are not told if the ships have artificial gravity, as the Hermes did, if they have their engine constantly firing to provide gravitation as happens to the ships of The Expanse or if they follow an Hohmann transfer orbit style one firing and coasting in microgravity for most of the trip. All we know is that there is regular service to the Kenya Space Center. My guess is that the ships doing the line between KSC and Artemis have are similar to the Adriatic ferries between Greece and Italy: There are several different accommodation types ranging from deck tickets to luxury suites. Also there are all sorts of amenities on boards such as at least two restaurants, bars and a disco. I also guess is that on the disco they play Nicki Minaj’s Starships, Prodigy’s Out of Space, PPK’s Resurrection and similar relevant space songs.
Foundation of Artemis
The person behind the foundation of the city is Fidelis Ngugi, formerly Kenya’s Minister of Finance. We are told that she managed to create the Kenyan Space Program and later Artemis out of nothing by taking advantage of Kenya’s equatorial position and offering unspecified incentives. Andy Weir never specifically mentions how the whole project started. We are not told who actually financed the construction of the city and of what nationality is the capital that did so. Retirees and criminals provide the capital that expanded and currently sustains the city. Is Kenya the origin of the capital that built the city? On the one hand Kenya has hosted a space program in the Broglio Space Center, located on the San Marco offshore platform. The Italian Space Agency operated the platform and used it to launch the American Scout launch vehicle 9 times between 1967 and 1988. On the other hand as a Piraean when I take a walk at the Marina of Zea in Piraeus I see a lot of megayachts flying the Liberian flag, but rarely if ever the Kenyan flag. Commentary on the web has noted the Spaceresource.lu initiative to mine asteroids, but has not noted that the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg is also offering its own money to start ups as part of the initiative. Will Kenya of a few decades in the future be able to offer significant money, as opposed to just a favorable legal status, in order to be the host country of the lunar city? Also considering the kind of status this sort of project confers to a country, why wouldn’t any of the major powers try and be the host country, especially if they are the ones providing the capital? McMurdo Station is located in Antarctica in the New Zealand claim and has people from all over the world, but from the description I have had from classmates that have worked there, it is at its core an American town.
Another thing we are not told about the city is who the people that founded it were and how they were selected or allowed to live there. Was a tender put out for colonists and who was allowed to answer? We know that Ammar Bashara, Jazz’s father, was not one of the original colonists but moved very early on. The smelter is managed by Loretta Sanchez who invented the -fictional- process used to smelt aluminum and seems to have been there since the start. The city grew with the push pull phenomenon typical of the settlement of the United States: an immigrant would arrive and he or she would bring his relatives – compatriots to live with him, leading to ethnic enclaves. The environmental systems are run by Vietnamese, welders are Saudis, Hungarians control HIBs which are a sort of maintenance robots. When Artemis was founded was there an original person doing that job from that particular country? And how was each job selected, was there an immigration type agreement to hire people of one job only from one country in exchange for that country actually funding the Artemis project? Is there some sort of limitation to immigration to Artemis? For the last parts we are led to believe that this is not the case. Jazz does not know of any agreement forcing all welders to be Saudis for example, is offered other jobs when young and is specifically told that the city welcomes retirees who bring their savings with them without limitations of origin.
The American example of immigration as the choice of the individual is not the only one that exists. The foundation of past poleis has been more of a state affair. Herodotus (4.150-153) mentions how Cyrene in modern day Libya was founded by the people of Thera (also called Santorini) (translated by A.D. Godley):
When Grinnus king of Thera asked the oracle [of Apollo in Delphi] about other matters, the priestess’ answer was that he should found a city in Libya. “Lord, I am too old and heavy to stir; command one of these younger men to do this,” answered Grinnus, pointing to Battus as he spoke. No more was said then. But when they departed, they neglected to obey the oracle, since they did not know where Libya was, and were afraid to send a colony out to an uncertain destination. For seven years after this there was no rain in Thera; all the trees in the island except one withered. The Theraeans inquired at Delphi again, and the priestess mentioned the colony they should send to Libya. So, since there was no remedy for their ills, they sent messengers to Crete to find any Cretan or traveller there who had travelled to Libya. In their travels about the island, these came to the town of Itanus, where they met a murex fisherman named Corobius, who told them that he had once been driven off course by winds to Libya, to an island there called Platea. They hired this man to come with them to Thera; from there, just a few men were sent aboard ship to spy out the land first; guided by Corobius to the aforesaid island Platea, these left him there with provision for some months, and themselves sailed back with all speed to Thera to bring news of the island. But after they had been away for longer than the agreed time, and Corobius had no provisions left, a Samian ship sailing for Egypt, whose captain was Colaeus, was driven off her course to Platea, where the Samians heard the whole story from Corobius and left him provisions for a year […] As for the Theraeans, when they came to Thera after leaving Corobius on the island, they brought word that they had established a settlement on an island off Libya. The Theraeans determined to send out men from their seven regions, taking by lot one of every pair of brothers, and making Battus leader and king of all. Then they manned two fifty-oared ships and sent them to Platea.
Reading Artemis I got the sense that most of those that have made the move are middle class to wealthy people who had a hunger to change scenery. The working class of Artemis seems to belong to the richer 10% of the globe rather than the poor masses of the Third World. The majority though of people who migrate today tend to be poor and often refugees. A $35,000 one way ticket price is not necessarily an obstacle for someone from a poor country to migrate to Artemis. Per the media smuggling into Europe from sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East or South Asia already costs in the order of $10,000. Per a Washington Post article a North Korean family paid in 2017 $30,000 to smuggle itself to South Korea. It is not at all necessary that the originating country pay for the trip: During the 2015 Aegean immigrant crisis in Greece we got the sense that the Visegrad countries would rather pay to send refugees on the moon than allow then to settle in their own country. Could it be that in several years into the future rich countries will pay to send the poor to colonize space in the same way that they financially support today refugee camps in Third World countries rather than allow refugees to settle in the rich countries? My personal opinion is that if all it takes to settle in Artemis is just paying a ticket to get there, it can easily turn into a dumping ground for the undesirables of the world. There is one major stumbling block for this: The prohibition on children under 6 (originally) and 12 (currently). One of the principal reasons for the postwar depopulation of the Greek islands was the lack of educational facilities. Entire families would move just so their child could go to high school. If children are not allowed, which is also a major limitation to tourism, we are likely to see entire families return to earth as soon as the mother gets pregnant. A city without children, while common in fantasy literature, is not viable in the real world.
Life support
Artemis has a pure Oxygen atmosphere at a pressure that is equivalent to the partial pressure of Oxygen on the earth’s surface. In the real world American spacecraft up to Apollo had a pure oxygen atmosphere, but even Skylab had a mixture of 75% Oxygen 25% Nitrogen due to fears of toxicity from long term exposure to pure oxygen. All other spaceships and the ISS have atmospheric composition and pressure closer to Earth sea level. Ships to Artemis that come from Earth begin with sea level atmosphere and slowly change it over the trip to pure Oxygen. The aluminum smelter produces huge amounts of Oxygen which is then piped in the polis. CO2 from breathing is separated and piped for agricultural use. On earth aluminum smelting produces CO2 rather than O2. The Sanchez process though uses rods made from Carbon and Chlorine that somehow produce O2. The pure oxygen atmosphere, other than serving an important plot point, is a design choice by Weir. I strongly feel though that he has not thought through all the implications. For one thing how do the trees in Aldrin Park that Jazz visits survive under pure oxygen in low atmospheric pressure is a mystery. If all the CO2 in the atmosphere is collected and pumped to the food farms, what could they be possibly photosynthesizing? Also plants get mixed signals at low atmospheric pressure leading them to show water stress even when fully watered. Finally without nitrogen, how would the nitrogen fixing bacteria in the soil fix N2 into nitrates? It could be that nitrogen for the plants is artificially provided through fertigation. Still though, a pure oxygen atmosphere is not very conductive to healthy soil functions.
Another question that is never addressed is what happens to other types of waste. Per Weir water is composed from local Oxygen and Hydrogen that was transported from earth and is continuously recycled. This implies tertiary treatment of wastewater. We are not told where the wastewater treatment plant is. What do they do with biosolids, a.k.a. activated sludge? Do they recover the nutrients? Do they compost it and use it as soil amendment? Do they just dry it and dump it out of the airlock? For that matter what do they do with solid waste in general? In The Expanse there is a universal recycling system, even used instead of burial for the dead. Who collects the garbage in Artemis? Who cleans the street and, more importantly how often do they go on strike? If anything tourists do not like to visit places that are dirty.
Artemis as a tourist destination
Artemis hotel capacity guesses
Weir has said, and it is noted in the novel, that the population of Artemis is 2,000 people. He does not mention though how many people visit the polis as tourists. I will use Greek analogies to try and give an estimate. In a place whose economy is dependent on tourism there are three types of inhabitants: the permanent population, those having temporary accommodation such as a second home who live part of the year –a category that can also include seasonal workers- and tourists which in general far outnumber the local population.
There are several forms of accommodation for tourists. In Greece formal tourist accommodations fall in three categories: hotels, rooms-to-rent (????????????? ???????) and campgrounds. I am pretty sure that everyone is familiar with hotels. They are generally categorized into star categories depending on the services they offer. Even a 1 star hotel though must meet a minimum number of requirements. Rooms-to-rent is an accommodation type that is described in tourist guides to Greece as “like a bed and breakfast without the breakfast part”. They are often owned by a local and are a family run business. Generally they are required to be licensed by Greek National Tourist Organization (GNTO), like hotels though they have much looser standards than hotels. They are quite popular with Greek tourists because they are cheaper than hotels but they often offer fewer services. Their rooms are often optimized for family vacations. A typical studio has one big room with two queen beds, a kitchenette and refrigerator plus a separate bathroom. They might not even have a reception and it is very rare that they offer breakfast. Very often bookings are not available on the internet, though you can often find the owner/manager’s phone number and call them at any time to book a room in advance. One of the rather typical scenes of summer in a Greek island is rent-a-room owners waiting right behind the catapult of an arriving ferry boat yelling the name of their room and their price in (tourist) English and whatever other language they can speak, trying to get clients among those that did not book accommodation before arriving on the island. In general this is the hardest part of hotel type accommodation to track, the Hellenic Statistical Authority has trouble tracking them because there are several that belong to the informal part of the economy. In other countries there are similar types of non-hotel permanent accommodations such as youth hostels, which are rare in Greece.
Camping in Greece can be in organized campgrounds or outside them, a practice known in Greece as free camping. In general free camping is forbidden in Greece, especially right now with the ongoing refugee crisis. There are several organized campgrounds, private and public, authorized by GNTO and tracked by the Hellenic Statistical Authority. In the last decade the sharing economy has also appeared in Greece with lodgings appearing in AirBnB and similar websites. The Greek government’s first reaction has been to crack down on the practice because of unfair competition to authorized and taxpaying hotels, rooms to rent and campgrounds. The problem that arose that often those putting their vacation home on the internet are people who are foreign citizens that are not permanent residents of Greece. Thus the government has been working with the websites to ensure that this kind of practice is legalized provided the owners of the accommodation pay the kind of heavy tax burden that formal accommodations have. Unfortunately it is difficult to find how many beds are available through the sharing economy, and even less so to find data on how many people have a summer house in a tourist destination that might bring over a friend for a visit.
Greece has 107 islands which mostly live off tourism. Several of them are of similar population to Artemis. On table 1 is a list of islands that had a winter population between 1,500 and 2,500 inhabitants in the 2011 census along with the accommodations they have. Now note that none of these four islands has an airport, though they have heliports mostly for medical evacuations. Visiting them from abroad means for Paxi landing in Ioannis Kapodistrias Corfu International Airport, going to the harbor and taking a ferry boat. For the other three islands which are in the Aegean it means landing at Eleftherios Venizelos, getting to the port of Piraeus and taking a boat trip lasting several hours. For hotels and campgrounds I used the Hellenic Statistical Authority to find capacity. For rooms to rent I used a variety of online sources, most important being the magazine “Diakopes” which has an online website (diakopes.gr) that mentions the capacity of rooms to rent. While there are several sources giving names and phone numbers of rooms-to-rent, only Diakopes had number of beds.
Figure 2: The 4 islands of table 1. From Google Maps
Of these 4 islands the only one I have visited is Paxi in late August 2009, which is in the Ionian Sea, where I stayed in a lighthouse. On top of the tourists staying in hotels, rooms to rent, campgrounds and sharing rooms with friends or strangers on the sharing economy, there were also several yachts both docked on the ports and marinas but also anchored offshore. It is very hard to guess how many people were there visiting, but my guess would be that they were more than the winter population. When complaining about the shortage of medical facilities the local governments gave some numbers to the press: Amorgos claims that while their winter population is 1,800 people, their summer population reaches 10,000. Kea claimed one year to have 5,000 people at the peak and another 10,000. Now islanders are known to exaggerate in order to get more resources from the national government. Table 1 shows that Paxi is rather less developed than other three islands in the Aegean that have a similar population to Artemis. The tourist peak in Greece comes in the first 20 days of August, when it is very hard to find any kind of vacancy, all the bed in Table 1 are definitely slept on by at least one person. If Artemis has the kind of tourist density of Paxi, I would conservatively guess that at the peak it has at least as many tourists as permanent residents, thus 2,000 people. If it has the tourist density of Ios, then at the tourist peak it has over 10,000 tourists.
Somehow all the tourists fit in Aldrin, having rooms that are bigger than Jazz’s cramped submarine bunk type room in Conrad. Weir thinks that a place that per his main character lives off tourism can do so while having significantly fewer tourists than residents at the peak of the tourist season. Granted, it is a long and expensive journey to Artemis, and Artemis also lives off the limited industry it has, supporting the scientists and the retirees. Still in Mediterranean tourist depended town such as Portimão in Portugal, Malia in Greece, Kusadasi in Turkey or Agia Napa in Cyprus, which I have all visited, tourist accommodation and services take more urban space than accommodation and services to locals. Also during the off season the tourist districts are ghost towns, everything boarded up in the main thoroughfare and if something is open it is most likely quite empty of visitors. Jazz never mentions the off season, likely because Weir thinks that as a destination it is not very seasonal. The question of hotel ownership, which is tied to the issue of who provided the capital that built Artemis, is never raised.
The Artemis tourist experience
Artemis follows the day night cycle of Kenya, which is simulated through artificial lighting. Weir describes a polis that generally follows a typical 24 hour cycle as is familiar to him: people wake up in the morning, go to work during the day and sleep at night. When Jazz sneaks out in the middle of the night for her job, she finds the place deserted. This is not how places that receive tourists always work: for one thing you will have many tourists suffering from jet lag. When I last visited Greece I would wake up at 1 am at first, it was 11 am in California. At the end of the 7 day trip, assuming the spaceship follows Kenya time, tourists would have adapted to the change. This is not the case though with shorter trips. Another issue is that individuals have their own time preference, and a comment that we make in Greece is that every nationality has its own cycle: Swedes are known to wake up early in the morning and sleep early even when on vacation. On the other hand we Greeks, who are known sing and dance until the break of dawn, sleep in the morning, waking up no earlier than noon. Working hours and arrangements of the tourist zones adapt to the tourists rather than force the tourists to adapt to them. I was utterly shocked when in Agios Nikolaos in Crete where I worked for 6 months in 2008/9 I discovered that the souvlaki grill was selling meat on Good Friday, until I realized that they were catering to the tourists, not to Greeks. Similarly I remember eating yaurtlu kebap in Chania at 4 am after a night out dancing at a local night club with friends while the store was starting to cook tiropita, bougatsa and other breakfast items for the morning crowd. They would start coming around 5 am when the boat from Piraeus was due and Western tourists were expected to wake up. Furthermore the last time I was in Thassos the super market had gained a large selection of vodkas to serve the needs of Eastern European tourists that are frequenting it. This was not the case during my childhood when foreign tourists were mostly West Germans that drunk beer.
The tourist experience is a two way street, both the locals and the tourists create the destination. However there is an innate tourist experience which is depended on the availability of the attractions at the destination. When I went to Mykonos as a student on I went there to take part of the Mykonos experience: Waking up briefly in the morning to catch hotel breakfast, sleeping again and then after finally waking up after noontime going to Super Paradise Beach to dance with some 2,000 others, mostly students to the electronic dance music played by the DJ. After 6 or 7 pm we would return to the hotel, have dinner, walk around and eventually end up at a more typical night club -the hottest place at the time was called “Space Dance”- no earlier than 11 pm. Afterwards we would go to Cavo Paradiso which opened at 2 am on weekdays and midnight on Friday and Saturday night, though it was wiser to show up after 4 am to listen to lounge music (and drink) while waiting for the sun to rise. Of course Mykonos has many other things to do: a waterpark where we had fun one afternoon before going to Super Paradise, awesome beaches to swim and do watersports, an archaeological museum which I did visit. More importantly, it is the visitation point for the sacred island of Delos where Apollo and Artemis were born which is completely protected as an archaeological site. The Mykonos Experience is not typical of Greek islands: Paros and Naxos for example are more oriented towards families while Tinos receives pilgrims who visit the Church of the Virgin Mary which holds a miraculous icon purportedly painted by the Evangelist Luke. This does not mean that you cannot do most things on most islands; it’s just that each island has a somewhat different tourist character. What is the typical tourist experience in Artemis? What is it that drives people to take such a long trip to the moon?
Jazz impersonates a tourist at some point, so we get to see at least part of it. She wakes up in the morning at a hotel, takes the train to the Apollo 11 site and goes out on an EVA to enjoy the site from behind a fence. The other thing mentioned is going out on a hamster type ball in the lunar surface and bouncing around and visiting the night life, which in Jazz’s case means silently drinking without music. She does mention though clubs where you can dance; she just doesn’t like that kind of entertainment. The Mykonos experience I mentioned is something that you can only really do for a long weekend. More than that you get tired of the dancing, and just go out to experience the beaches, cultural heritage, physical environment, different settlements on the island and other type of attractions. The Artemis experience mentioned above in the end will also fit a long weekend. Day 1 you go to Apollo 11, day 2 on a hamster ball and Artemis is not exactly described as the sort of place where you can go on bar crawls lasting days. Who would really travel two weeks just to spend 3 days on Artemis? There is always people-watching, when you sit on a coffee shop on a main thoroughfare and watch people going by. I remember when in the last year of my undergrad studies we visited Monte Carlo with the university, classmates of mine engaged in people-watching while I went with others to the Oceanographic Museum. As they told us afterwards they were near the casino and would see expensive sports cars driving there to let their patrons off. Apparently my male classmates ogled the cars while my female classmates were salivating over the expensive designer clothes that the fashion models in the passenger seats were wearing. Why doesn’t Artemis have other attractions, such as guided rover geology tours of the surface around the polis, guided tours of the smelter or the nuclear reactor, some amusement park type destination? If you want people to visit, you need to offer them things to do that will take a longer time to accomplish than the trip getting there.
Visitors to Artemis
Tourists described in the novel are families with older children, a married Arab woman without her husband and retirees. This does not quite capture the gamut of categories that choose to go on tourism. If you visit Greece during the school year you will run into foreign schools on educational trips. Much as a trip to Artemis is far more expensive, I see no reason why schools should not be there. I am pretty sure that students of Swiss boarding school, British Public schools or American Preparatory Academies can afford to take a trip to Artemis. Alternatively busy parents can send their kids with the nanny while they are running their corporation. Much as Artemis is rather expensive and too long a trip for Spring Break, the current price for Semester at Sea ranges between $23,950 and $31,950. I am pretty sure that a Semester at Artemis program would appear. We are likely to see corporate retreats for the upper management at Artemis, though scientific conferences seem unlikely: grants will pay a few thousand for a trip of a professor with a few students but not $100,000 each. No religious site is mentioned in Artemis, so we are not likely to see pilgrims before the first monastery is founded there, if not a few generations later after said monastery has produced important personalities. For that matter The Expanse describes a solar system without monasteries of any kind, which I find very weird. If indeed the world of The Expanse is a continuation of today’s world, I see no reason why this kind of religious expression would disappear considering how common it is around the world.
No sporting events are mentioned in the text and thus it is unlikely we would see mass sport tourism. In general it is hard to have physical sports on the moon due to low gravity: you need real training to send a soccer ball in the goal post as opposed to kicking it off the stadium. What would be likely to see is e-sports, a.k.a. video games so long there is no 3 second lag. There are several channels showing e-sports on basic cable, if the company making them wanted they could sponsor a tournament to the moon to raise publicity. Medical tourism is a very high possibility, a case is even mentioned, but for now Artemis lacks the infrastructure to really support it. In the case mentioned a wealthy Norwegian has moved with his daughter to Artemis because of her condition. This is quite realistic to expect. What Weir though seems to ignore is how generous is the welfare state is outside the United States. National Health Systems of wealthy countries do pay for rehabilitation abroad today. Jazz should not be surprised that there is a Norwegian there for that purpose, but that there isn’t a colony of recovering people taking advantage of lunar gravity with the cost being underwritten by their national health systems. As a general note though, tourists crave safety and strong law and order. People do not visit a place so as to get robbed there. Surprisingly Artemis does not offer that, there is only one Mountie that is supposed to offer security for all the people all the time.
Life in the polis
Law and Order
When people are on vacation, they often do things they would not dare do at home, especially after a few drinks. On top of that policing tourists often creates a moral dilemma: How much of their behavior do you police and following which legal and moral code? Tourists come from another society that often has differing values. Do you want to enforce your own society’s values on them? Do you create a tourist enclave under foreign law and if so, how much do you allow of your own people to partake in the vices of the tourists? What should be the case about behavior which is considered normal or at least tolerable in your society but not in the visitor’s society? Should the tourist enjoy the advantage of both societies without either’s obligation? These are issue on top of the more generic issues between law and society for the local population. We really do not see much of tourists being policed in the novel. What we do see is policing of the locals. I was utterly shocked when I read in the novel that Andy Weir’s version of law and order in Artemis features lynch mobs! Why would you ever want to go to a place where your everyday behavior might lead the locals to lynch you and you have no recourse? Tourists are by far the most fickle people over security, they demand absolute security from all dangers real or perceived; this is not what Artemis is offering. This is even more prominent in places that cater to the rich. Monte Carlo is a police state, this is part of the appeal. Italians can display their expensive cars and expensive clothes and jewelry without fear of being robbed, which is a real danger in Northern Italy.
When you live in a tourist country, things that tourists do will make the news. Over time you learn to recognize patterns in behavior, which may or may not correspond to how they act in their home country. Tourists want to participate even partially in the life of the destination, but also want to be part of their home country to which they will return after all. The most typical tourists request is that they watch a home sporting event taking place when they are outside. I most certainly remember when I last was in Thassos every seaside cafeteria/bar in Limenaria was advertising how they were the best place to see the Champions League qualifying game between Partizan Belgrade and Steaua Bucharest. I have no idea how the game went or its aftermath though my sense is that nothing happened afterwards. The issue arises when a game, especially of the kind that attracts passion, has a questionable call. A celebration by the team that the call was in favor can lead to a knuckle fight between groups of fans. While you can expect the establishment’s security to kick you out, this might just lead to a street brawls between mobs of sport fans. Is one Mountie really capable of breaking up a fight between 100 fans? Should Artemis then make watching sports illegal? It is simply not just an issue of sports.
We have had cases in Greece of a tourist killing another tourist because he made advances on that tourists’ girlfriend in a club. I remember the case of a 200 kg female Scandinavian tourist going from bar to bar, causing damage to the places after her advances to male patrons were rebuked, getting thrown out until eventually she made it to the main road, stopped a car by sitting on it and causing hood damage, and then dragging out the driver and sexually assaulting him. But much as these are all sporadic events, and I am sure that everyone living in a tourist country has such stories to share, there is the systematic event known as closing time. In Greece in general the idea of closing time was legislated in the mid-1990s and abandoned after popular outcry: adults do like to be told when to sleep. Still just because tourists do not all leave at the same time, this does not mean that they do not do stupid things on the way out, just that it does not have a specific time it happens. When leaving the bars at closing time in Blacksburg, Raleigh or Fresno the sober will notice the massive police presence out at the time. Drunk people can assault other people for no reason. Getting drunk reduces sexual inhibitions, and this not just leads to sexual assault but also to sexual activity in full public view. A major Cypriot newspaper had in its front page pictures of tourists at Agia Napa behaving indecently at 4 am. Cypriot police did respond to the public outcry by increasing police presence, but this was only up to a limit: Party places live off people behaving in ways that are unacceptable at home. Bar and hotel owners are known to lobby for light treatment, send them to a room or at most to a prison cell for a night, do not send them in prison for long or outlaw the behavior completely. As mentioned earlier there is a strong possibility that Artemis would be a place that never sleeps. Is Rudy capable on his own of managing mobs of drunkards at Aldrin?
Much as tourists are known to get rowdy and be a danger to themselves and others, they also need protection from the locals. I remember a case of bouncers beating a tourist to a coma and killing him because they thought wrongly that he was a potential thief. Dangers to the tourist do not need to be though so obvious. In the novel a barkeep is creating an adulterated distilled alcoholic drink which he tests on a willing Jazz. This sort of behavior is extremely dangerous; in Greece we have had people go blind after drinking adulterated drinks that had excessive methanol. It has not only been tourists: a soldier on the Evros border was visited by his family which crossed into Turkey and bought a bottle of Yeni Raki which they gifted to him. He went permanently blind from drinking it. There are also several other activities that tourist police does in order to preserve the quality of the tourist experience and name of the destination. If a taxi driver, hotelier or restaurant owner overcharges you, the tourist police is where you find recourse. If the restaurant serves you rotten food, there should be police force for that. If the owner of the establishment is not giving you receipts, cooks the books and cheats on his taxes, he should not be allowed to compete with legitimate businessmen. Rudy is shown having great knowledge of criminal activity in Artemis all the way down to domestic abuse, but is he also the kind of person that performs analysis on food and drink, criminal fraud investigations, has knowledge of taxation and economic laws enough to smell a scam? If so, I guess then that after Artemis he ought to apply for the Avengers or the Justice League, he definitely has the qualifications.
But tourists are not the only people on Artemis, there are locals. As mentioned, locals come from many cultures, each with each own values. Artemis though does not have any written laws. If you do something wrong Rudy will beat you, if it is something very wrong you get deported to Earth. Rudy though is not the only source of law, ad hoc morality polices form from among the Artemisians and lynch whoever did something that is against their code of justice. The major problem is, what really informs said code of justice? We are given an example in the novel of someone being lynched for living with teenagers. What if said person was the owner of the largest employer in Artemis? Would people lynch him, or would they protect him and feed his sexual urges with unsuspecting teenagers in order to protect their jobs?
The problem is what happens when we talk about less important things that are offensive to one group but not another. I remember when I was in Portugal in Praia da Rocha near Portimão in Portugal a group of preteen non-Portuguese tourists, each with a beer bottle at hand, walking on the main thoroughfare at the seaside. In Portugal, and in Greece for that matter, this is legal behavior; there is no minimum alcohol age and walking in public with an alcohol container is fully legal. Me and my Portuguese friend were commenting that this is disgraceful behavior but in the end those kids were only imitating their parents, who would also be going on a bar crawl soon. In the US this sort of behavior is considered criminal, both for the kids and their parents (child endangerment). Should American-Artemisians form a morality patrol that trashes stores selling alcohol to minors and lynches store owners, kids and their parents that tolerate this sort of behavior? What happens if the relatives of those so attacked go and attack the lynching mob and their relatives? In Aeschylus’ Oresteia, the only theater trilogy that has survived from antiquity, we have Agamemnon returning from 10 years leading the Greeks in the Trojan War where he is killed while taking a bath by his wife Clytemnestra for cheating on her in Troy, with the help of her lover. Then their son Orestes kills his mother in vengeance for his father’s death, but is then haunted by the Erinyes or Furies, spirits of matriarchical vengeance. Mad from the tormenting of the Erinyes he flees to Athens, where the Areopagus, the court of law for issues of murder, tries him and finds him the killing justified with the goddess Athena casting the tie breaking vote. The theme of Oresteia is moving from a primitive society of the holy law of vengeance to a human political society of laws and courts. Alas Artemis is a primitive society in anarchy, not a socially developed political society. But then again the political system of Artemis is even more problematic that lynching.
Institutional structure
Artemis, with a population of 2,000 people, is approximately the size of a small ancient Greek city state. After reading the novel though it is obvious that politically Artemis is absolute monarchy ruled by the administrator and founder, Fidelis Ngugi. Rudy DuBois enforces the law, which at times he makes up, but he defers to Ngugi, not the people of Artemis. In her person she holds legislative, executive and judiciary power. King Battus as the founder of Cyrene never had the kind of power Fidelis has.
Ancient Greek city states had for the most part a tripartite power structure: at the top there was a king or some other type of titular leader, in the middle there was an assembly of selected men, the modern equivalent would be Parliament and at the bottom there was the General Assembly of all male citizens, the ecclesia of the people. The specific power vested at each level of the governing structure and the composition of each body, let alone the name, depended on the specific city and the time. Macedonia was a monarchy ruled by the king. Below him were the Royal Friends (Vasiliki Eteri) who, in addition to forming the cavalry in battle, advised the king and below them were the Foot Friends (Pezeteroi) who formed the infantry but were also the body that selected who would be king among the male members of the Royal House, would remove a bad king and appoint regents if the king was a minor. In Athens, which was a democracy, the head of the state was the Archon whose main job was to preside over the religious ceremonies of the state. Below him was the Parliament (Voule) which would prepare laws but all the power was at the hands of the ecclesia, the assembly of all free Athenian males which would vote laws, declare wars, sign peace, appropriate money and generally do all acts of power. A citizen who would not take part in politics was called an idiotevon, which is where the word idiot comes from: someone so dumb he is not even interested in politics.
It seems that the polis of Artemis-on-the-Moon is inhabited by idiots living in an absolute monarchy for not only do we not hear of any political body, we do not even hear of any political process. There is no city council or assembly of the citizens. We do not hear of any political discussion for that matter in the entire novel. Worse of all the whole plot of the novel confirms the aphorism about dictatorship that I heard in Barcelona when referring to Franco’s regime: In a dictatorship everyone is oppressed, but if you have the right connections you can do whatever you wish. Jazz is a pawn in a plot of a powerful person to append the current economic structure of the polis. When you do not have an institutional structure in place, violence becomes the only recourse. Much as Weir has tried to build a techno-utopia, scratch under the surface and you see a dystopia where the law of the jungle rules. There is a not so benevolent leader on top who has decisions over life and death among the inhabitants. Those on her good graces can do whatever they please. The rest must suffer lynchings if what their actions do not please some constituency and can suffer arbitrary loss of property, if not life without any hope for recourse.
The issue with the lack of laws and courts not just a theoretical concern. In order to survive and grow Artemis needs external investment. Playgrounds for the rich such as Monte Carlo, Gstaad, Paris and London are also places where the wealthy park their wealth in various forms such as real estate or various financial instruments. Large investors demand a stable institutional framework that spells out what is allowed and forbidden, what are the potential economic benefits and costs and what is the recourse that can be taken if there is a dispute among parties. Say that the property of an absentee landowner is squatted by an Artemisian. What is the course of action he would partake? Ask Fidelis or Rudy directly? What if both prove derelict in their duties because the squatter is strongly connected? Should the landowner hire a mob to evict the squatter? What about the case that we are talking about the landowner demanding higher rent than is in the rental contract and then hiring a mob to expel the tenant? Laws are out to protect everyone from the arbitrariness of others. The irony is that we do see state employees in action: Artemis has a policeman, the inspector that Jazz bribes as part of her smuggling, those controlling the environmental systems and those picking up the garbage. What rules and regulations determines their conduct is never quite told and at times we are led to believe that they just do what they want.
Services
Artemis is somehow both a generally tax free zone and not a financial center. Monte Carlo is a major financial center; wealthy individuals use it in order to hide their assets from their home tax authorities and a safe refuge from political upheaval. The only country that has free access to Monte Carlo’s asset information is France. This comes from an agreement between Prince Rainier and Charles De Gaulle after the French president complained how the Principality is used as a tax haven by rich French. The agreement is that the French are allowed to see French assets but in exchange Value Added Tax of Montegascin industry collected in France is passed on to the principality. Some two thirds of the Principality’s state income comes from VAT in France. In the 1950s, before the agreement with France, Aristotelis Onassis tried to take over the Principality and reduce Prince Rainier to a figurehead. He saw that having sovereign cover to his business would allow him to do things that he could not simply do by only having a corporation. Still Onassis kept the base of his businesses there. Monte Carlo hosts an entire ecosystem of financial services supported by lawyers, financial analysts and other similar jobs. It has though a series of laws to ensure that the wealthy actually reside in the Principality. Corporations cannot take advantage of its tax status unless 3/4th of their turnover comes from within the Principality. Why Artemis does not cultivate this kind of services, considering that having access to cheap capital for financing would allow development of the colony, is unknown, or more in universe a major failure by Fidelis Ngugi.
Agriculture and Food
Per Weir himself the only food grown in Artemis is the green algae Chlorella. It is grown in vats under artificial illumination and then processed through the addition of artificial flavors into gank, the food of Artemis. All other food is transported from Earth and it is quite expensive since at the conversion rate of the slug being 6 slugs per US dollar, each thing transported costs $166/kg. Weir is far from the only person to claim that in the name of efficiency the only crop grown and eaten in space will be algae; that idea seems to be quite popular online. As an agronomist I really do not understand why a concept from the 1940s which from the 1960’s on it had become obvious that did not pan out has such a following among the futuristically inclined. For one thing it was not a topic discussed at the Tri-Societies meetings (Agronomy Society of America, Soil Science Society of America, Crop Science Society of America) when I attended them as a PhD student, as a promising future food source. Searching around the web growing algae for food is more in the purview of the Phycological Society of America. I went to their website to find a snapshot of their current research so I looked up their 2016 Annual Meeting program, which is the most recent on the web. The majority of the sessions and talks were about the biology of algae and seaweed in general, their use as indicators of environmental health though there was once session about algae use as biofuel. I went to Google Scholar and searched “Chlorella production methods”. Of the first 10 papers returned 7 had the word biodiesel in the title, of the other three one was a general review paper on production methods, the second had the word biodiesel in the abstract and the third is a patent to produce a high value ketocarotenoid. Simply put Chlorella production as a food source is not a major research priority today. I realize though that people do not get their information through a search in the scientific literature, as the sections above and below show neither do I when I try to understand a topic on which I am not a specialist. So I looked up the Wikipedia page. It seems that Chlorella specifically, and algae in general, were identified as a promising technology to fight world hunger in the 1940 because it can be grown supplementary to field crops on local ponds and because they can capture 8% of solar radiation in photosynthesis. As Wikipedia though continues in the Chlorella article:
Although the production of Chlorella looked promising and involved creative technology, it has not to date been cultivated on the scale some had predicted. It has not been sold on the scale of Spirulina, soybean products, or whole grains. Costs have remained high, and Chlorella has for the most part been sold as a health food, for cosmetics, or as animal feed. After a decade of experimentation, studies showed that following exposure to sunlight, Chlorella captured just 2.5% of the solar energy, not much better than conventional crops. Chlorella, too, was found by scientists in the 1960s to be impossible for humans and other animals to digest in its natural state due to the tough cell walls encapsulating the nutrients, which presented further problems for its use in American food production.
Eating Chlorella and single cell protein has several disadvantages, beyond the unpalatability. Per Wikipedia eating 50 g/day of single cell protein, and algae qualifies as such, is toxic to monogastric animals such as humans. The reason given is that it contains too much nucleic acid for animals to digest well. Since Wikipedia is not always the best resource I tried to source the statement to something more academic. Turns out review articles on the use of Chlorella mention toxicity due to metal contamination, but do not mention anything about excessive nucleic acid. Thus I looked up to see articles on Chlorella and algae in general as animal feed. Simply put there haven’t been that many recent papers but what I did find was that it is possible to have animal fed up to 10% algae without animal mortality rising. The specific effects depend on the animal species and dose, with some having positive outcomes from substitution and others negative. There haven’t been that many experiments since the discouraging experiments of the 1960s to 1980s because algae derived foods cost 10 times as much as normal animal feed. I could not find experiments on humans to see what a full algae diet would mean, if anything the recommendations online on eating Chlorella are in the order of 2 or 3 g per day with even enthusiasts eating about 15 g/day. The average person eats 1,878 grams of food per day which ranges from 1,012 kg for Somalis to 2,729 for Americans (https://www.nationalgeographic.com/what-the-world-eats/). Is it safe to eat that much Chlorella per day, every day for your entire life? Is Chlorella capable of providing all the nutrients humans need to survive? Per the internet six types of nutrients are necessary for human survival: proteins, carbohydrates, lipids (fats), vitamins, minerals and water, with fiber mentioned as a seventh component in other sites. This categorization is pretty consistent with the nutrition requirements for animals that I am familiar with as an agronomist. Is Chlorella alone, even with additives and artificial flavors, capable of providing the right nutrients of the right biological value (think saturated versus unsaturated fats or why olive oil is superior to butter) at the proper quantities for a proper human nutrition. My feeling from my experiences as an agronomist and from life experiences in general is that it is not.
Efficiency is a very fluid concept and one needs to balance a large series of parameters. Per my college textbooks factors affecting agriculture are categorized into climatic and edaphic (soil based) factor. Climatic factor include solar radiation, temperature, humidity, wind, evapotranspiration and CO2 concentration. Edaphic factor are soil structure such as mechanical properties, soil composition and nutrients. In following Weir’s efficiency fallacy, rather than choose radiation efficiency I choose nitrogen use efficiency. The crop with the highest Nitrogen Use Efficiency is almonds with a value of 70% when the rest of the major crops are closer to 40%. Thus if we are to follow Weir’s logic Artemisians should only eat almonds which they turn to almond milk, almond oil and other almost products. Artemis’ food production facilities should look then like Fresno, after all most of the world’s almond crops are produced in California’s Central Valley.
ESA’s MELiSSA project is, to the best of my knowledge, the most advanced ongoing project to create an artificial ecology that produces sufficient nutrient food for all. I have talked about them before here in Centauri Dreams. They use 9 crops (wheat, tomato, potato, soybean, rice, spinach, onion, lettuce and spirulina) and they have enlisted Michelin starred chefs to make food that is tasty in addition to nutritious. Also their configuration is tied to the life support system, turning human waste to food. A mature MELiSSA system will not need the aluminum smelter pumping oxygen into the system; it will be able to recycle the entire nutrient supply. So far MELiSSA is in development of the regenerative systems to supports its cycle but it has made significant progress into creating palatable balanced food. Their finding, which is also corroborated by other space food research, involves the use of energy bars for space nutrition: put the entirety of a balanced meal in a compact calorie laden bar that takes little volume to store and can be eaten rapidly. This is far less innovative than it seems: the food that hoplites brought while on campaign away from home was pasteli, a bar made of sesame seed and honey. It seems that the food eaten by astronauts exploring Mars will be a descendant of what Alexander’s pezeteroi ate while conquering half the known world.
But what would be the required area to locally feed Artemis using hydroponics? A number I remember from my undergrad days is that hydroponics requires 250 to 500 m2 of growing area to feed a person for a year. Now growing area does not meet geometric area, if you grow three crops of potatoes in an area of 100 m2 then you have a growing area of 300 m2 but a geometric area of 100 m2. This is very important when you consider that crops grown hydroponically have a faster growth cycle than soil grown crops. Assuming 250 m2 per person, to feed 2,000 people you would need 500,000 m2. Per Figure 1 the domes have a diameter of 200 m, or a radius of 100 m meaning that their area is ?*1002 = 31,416 m2. Dividing the two values we need the surface area of 15.9 domes. However the dome does not have only one level, after all Aldrin Park alone takes 4 levels. Conrad bubble has Up 19 and Down 6, thus at least 25 levels.
Another common fallacy that Andy Weir falls into is related to artificial flavors. He seems to believe that they can be sourced on the Moon. Artificial flavors are not, for the most part, mineral flavors. Their many sources are petroleum and coal. These are not known to be found on the moon, thus they would need to be imported from earth. If so, why do they not just import natural flavors and have beef flavored gank made with bouillon?
Speaking of flavor, if Jazz has been eating gank since she was 6, by now she should find it very tasty because of what I call the black broth effect. Spartans ate a staple soup made of boiled pig’ legs, blood, salt and vinegar, known in Greek as ????? ?????. By all accounts it was horrible to taste: a Sybarite upon eating it remarked “Now I know why Spartans do not fear death, to die is to be relieved from eating it”. Yet Spartans ate it with pleasure and often did not like other food. When a Spartan delegation visited the Lidyan king Croesus and asked what they wanted, they rejected the luxurious Asian foods he offered and wanted black broth. Jazz ought to welcome eating gank after 20 years on it.
In terms of drink what is mentioned is beer and hard liquor. Hard liquor comes from earth but we are led to believe that that beer is local, even though Artemis does not grow barley or for that matter rye and wheat. It is very likely that Weir has in his mind a definition of beer that significantly differs from the Reinheitsgebot that includes the use of Chlorella in brewing, otherwise at $166/kg Jazz should not be able to afford getting drunk. If some sort of beer-like concoction is grown locally, why is yeast not also consumed afterwards as food as is the case with marmite and vagamite? Or is the yeast used in the creation of gank? We are not given an ingredient list for gank after all.
Industry
Artemis is not a major industrial location nor is industry a major employer. Two major heavy industries are mentioned, Sanchez Aluminum and the Nuclear Power Plant. One light industry is specifically mentioned too, Queensland Glass. Other than that the tourist trinket shops sell models of the Apollo Lunar Landers made out of lunar dust that seem to be factory made rather than hand maid. Sanchez Aluminum is the biggest industry employing 80 people. As mentioned earlier they use a fictional process for smelting of Aluminum that also produces oxygen as a byproduct. In actual aluminum industry what they use is carbon rods made from tar and coal. Sanchez Aluminum consumes 80% of the power produced by the nuclear power plant. We are not given specifics on the nuclear power plant, but there is good reason to believe that the nuclear fuel cycle takes place on earth rather than the Moon. Artemis, simply put, is not energy independent. The specifics of the light industry inside Armstrong are not spelled out beyond the glassworks.
Education
We are told of Jazz’s backstory through a series of letters with her Kenyan pen pal Kevin and Jazz apparently has had teachers who told her that she has a lot of potential. We are led to believe that these teachers live in Artemis. All four Greek islands of table 1 have elementary, middle and high school. In these islands though children are allowed to be born, this is not the case with Artemis where children under 6, and eventually under 12 are not allowed. We have seen islands be depopulated by families moving to the nearest city so that their children can go to middle or high school. Realistically the entire family would move from Artemis as soon as the woman got pregnant, not just the mother. Not allowing children is not conductive to the long term development of a place, and the school system is the epicenter of the problem.
Speaking of the school system, who does it work for and what is being taught? Who sets up the school curriculum and who do the teachers answer to? Who decides what is to be taught in say Physics class? Where can the students appeal if they do not like their grades? Who has written the school books and what is their ideological slant? In the US homeschooling is driven by many reasons but for most parents choosing it, it is to avoid the secular wickedness of public schools. In Greece debates over what is in the school history books are known to bring down governments. Is Fidelis the one who in the end decides what is the next generation of Artemisians getting taught? Does she promote democracy as the preferred regime, or is education used to justify her absolutist regime? The educational system of the Byzantine Empire taught students about democracy in the Ancient Greek city states which it considered its direct ancestor (see for example emperor Leo the Wise’s Tactics or George Sphrantzes Chrlonicle) and about the Roman Republic (after all it saw itself as the Roman Empire) but considered the absolute monarchical regime as the best possible. The Byzantine Emperor was the Ideal Perfect King of Plato’s Republic. What are Young Artemisians taught that ought to be their place in the polis and in the Solar System? Are Artemisians taught that they are God’s chosen people in the way that youth of the Byzantine Empire were? Are they taught that Artemis is a unique exceptional state in the mode of American Exceptionalism? Are they taught that the individual is only worth as the cog in the machine of juche and must submit to the will of the Dear Leader to create the perfect socialist regime? We are not told.
We are not even told what is the official language of Artemis, though we are told to believe that it is English. A major omission that I saw is the lack of multilingual education, at the very least in order to cater to the tourists. When Jazz showed up in the hotel impersonating a female Arab tourist who did not speak good English, why did the receptionist did not speak Arabic to her or call someone who did? Having lived in a tourist zone, the first requirement for receptionists is multilingualism. In Agios Nikolaos of Crete I did run into ads requesting night receptionists that spoke French, I seriously considered staying in the city after my agronomist contract ended to work as one since I am fluent in four languages. Who in Artemis would teach Cantonese, Arabic (to mention tourist languages specifically spoken in the novel) or any other language and who would certify the tests? Even if they use state certification from Earth, who would be the one administering the tests on the Moon?
Artemis apparently has no university though it hosts quite a large number of PhDs exploring the moon as members of their space agencies. Monte Carlo has a university more specialized towards business. It is located in Stade Louis II, taking up the space below the bleachers. Since Artemis has the staff, it could host a university that would also attract people from Earth to immigrate there as students. Then again, it would also need an education authorization body and we have not seen any such bodies in the novel.
Health Care
Health care in Artemis is provided by exactly one doctor, Dr. Melanie “Doc” Roussel. She has a small private medical clinic that is capable of limited medical care and hosts a few beds. No nurse is mentioned or any other medical personnel and apparently it lacks intensive care. If you come down with something serious in Artemis and Doc Roussel cannot cure it, you will die unless you can survive long enough for a 7 day trip back to Earth. No other medical practitioner on the surface of the moon is mentioned. Now this is a rather typical case for the rural United States as I have learned from experience but for a European this is unacceptable. ESA has a medical doctor stationed at the Concordia station in Antarctica doing medical research on the isolated researchers there during winter, as part of human factors research for space exploration. Why would ESA, or any space agency for that matter, allow its personnel to be in such a medically limited location as in Artemis? For that matter McMurdo Station, which also has a population of 2,000 people does have a hospital staffed by the National Science Foundation. Per what I could find of the internet it has a staff of 5: 3 doctors, 1 nurse practitioner and one plain nurse. It is not just the scientists that need a hospital, the tourists also need a place to mend alcohol intoxication or broken bones and, more importantly, for retirees. I will leave aside the possibility of medical tourism. In the studies on how make Greece a more attractive destination for European retirees to live there one thing consistently mentioned is that retirees demand a large and well equipped hospital near because being elderly they have significant medical needs.
The Greek islands host medical facilities for the locals and the tourists. While there are private doctors in all of Greece, the Greek public national health system provides services to all of the population of Greece. Our health system is composed of hospitals, health centers and farm clinics and it follows the administrative division of the country. There is a publically owned hospital in the capital of every prefecture in Greece (the American equivalent is the county) and below that there are health centers and farms clinics in the subperfectures and municipalities depending on the population. To use the example of the four islands from table 1, Amorgos health center has a pathologist, a general doctor, a microbiologist and a pediatrician. There are also 4 farm doctors –the Greek state requires medical school graduates to work two years as farm doctors before they are allowed to start medical specialization- plus two ambulance drivers and one lab technician. Ios has 6 doctors of which one is a general practitioner, one is a pathologist, one orthopedic, one pediatrician and two farm doctors. Also it has 3 nurses and one midwife. The locals complain that this is insufficient. Kea has two general doctors, one pediatrician, one nurse, one lab tech and one ambulance doctor. Paxi has one pathologist, one general practitioner, one pediatrician, one dentist, 3 nurses, one medical equipment technician, one physical therapist and one general duties technical secretarial staff. The people complain that they do not have specialized doctors such as cardiologists, psychiatrists, gynecologists or ophthalmologist. They have only one ambulance driver but considering that they get only 1 to 2 incidents a month that require transportation they find it sufficient. Now the Paxians are I would say a bit over complaining. Per article 5 of Greek law 4486/2017 these are the staffing analogies that primary health facilities should have: 1 General Practitioner per 2,000 to 2,500 adults, 1 pediatrician per 1,000 to 1,500 children, 2 radiologists per 25,000 to 30,000 inhabitants, 1 biopathologist per 25,000 to 30,000 inhabitants, 1 cardiologist per 25,000 to 30,000 inhabitants and 1 dentist per 10,000 inhabitants. Since Paxi isn’t that big, for specialists they should be able to find them in Corfu or Igoumenitsa. Alas though Artemis does not have any other medical facilities closer to earth, so it ought to have a small hospital with a staff of around 10 people and an intensive care unit. How though would the people to pay for health care if there is no health insurance on the Moon?
Labor conditions
Going on vacation most often means that you have paid leave on your work contract with your employer. If you are self-employed you can close your business, which is likely to happen at time when business is low anyway. But what are the labor conditions of those working in Artemis, servicing the tourists? In addition to slugs what else is part of each paycheck? Do Artemisians get paid time off themselves? Do they get retirement or health insurance? If they have a complaint with their boss, who is to arbitrate it? I think that it is safe to guess that employees of Earth based space agencies and their contractors have to broad protections and rights their Earth bound colleagues do. Since Artemisian employees are generally unionized we can expect those working for major employers such as Sanchez Aluminum to have some benefits to go with the paycheck. It is obvious though that Jazz has absolutely no benefits in addition to whatever she scrapes by her gig. For that matter, the person that she bribes so that she can do her smuggling also does not seem to have any benefits: if he was certain of his future, why would he need a bribe? Rather the whole premise of Jazz taking The Big Job is that she can retire, most likely because there is no retirement system. Most certainly we do not hear of people discussing just how many stamps or days they needed to get before the system gives them a pension or they qualify for unemployment benefits. Granted, Jazz hangs out at a bar where people drink in silence, rather than the modern day ecclesia: a coffee shop where people constantly talk about politics, gossip, sports and relationships. Still the only time that a union is mentioned is Ammar Bashara saying that it is stupid to pay 10% of his paycheck as union dues, it is just taxation. If members of the welder’s union get health care and pension as part of their contribution, then Ammar is the one being stupid. The labor conditions of Artemis are what the communists in college when I was an undergrad were deriding as the evil medieval future that was coming if we did students did not rise in a worker’s revolution against capitalism. Considering that the people rose against Existent Socialism and brought its end 8 years before I first entered college, I was not keen on revolting. They did have a point though: the Uber-ization of work means that my generation works in worse labor condition than my parents’. Weir believes that this will continue on, until by the time of Artemis workers have no rights and we are back in the era of Karl Marx and the Reserve Army of Labor.
Up until the late 19th century your prosperity in life was associated with the years you were able to be productive. Starting with Bismarck and Napoleon III we have seen in Europe the construction of the welfare state: The idea that everyone deserves a minimum of rights in life, such as a safe and healthy job, health care so that being sick does not mean going bankrupt, income at the end of life when you are too sick and frail to work, financial support when you are between jobs, paid vacation so that you can look forward to when you are doing a monotonous job. Now there is a long discussion over what and how much the welfare state should cover and when does it become a hammock holding back the economic well-being of society. What is certain is that Artemisians do not have any sort of safety net. When I was living in Agios Nikolaos in the winter of 2008/9 I would see every 15 days people lining up at the unemployment office to receive benefits. I was told that they were hotel workers who do not work in the off season while the hotel is closed, the tourist season after all does not last more than 6 months for most of Greece. The relationship is mutually beneficial to the hotel owners and the state: The money that their seasonal employees get in the winter is money that they will not demand in the summer as higher wages. Unemployment status in Greece also gives health insurance under some limitations. What is surprising about Artemis is that an informal welfare state also appears to be nonexistent. As a good grandson I took care of my grandparents at the end of their lives, just as they had taken care of me as a baby. In Artemis children under 6 originally and 12 by the time of the novel are not around. Would young Artemisians feel responsibility to take care of their grandparents if all they really knew of them was the grumpy old person who is telling teenager you what not to do? Also monasteries are known to act historically as retirement communities: The Byzantine historian Sphrantzes at the end of his life wished to retire and discovered that the only way he could get elderly care was as a monk. So he was forced to divorce his wife, which they both loved each other very much and they both took monastic vows in separate monasteries. It is during this time that he wrote his Chronicle, giving an inside view of the Fall of Constantinople since he was a personal friend of the Last Emperor, Constantine XI. Artemis is a place for the rich to go and die, the rest are better off if they do not reach old age.
Final thoughts
During my last bout of unemployment I decided to catch up with the Arrowverse. I started watching Arrow first, and after I had seen all the episodes I wrote a post on Facebook what I saw as wrong. The show, at least in the first seasons, tries to be rather realistic and anchored in the real world. Afterwards I moved up to The Flash. Much as I enjoyed it far more, and I do think that it is the better show, from the moment I was willing to accept superpower granting Dark Matter and the whole concept of the Speed Force I really could not complain about them getting some things wrong. Andy Weir has written a science fiction novel with a very high degree of realism that invites the sort of nitpicking I have engaged in in this article. His World Building does leave gaps but this is understandable, even the master World Builder of our era, George R. R. Martin has left quite a few gaps in A Song of Ice and Fire. I look forward to reading Andy Weir’s next novel and I hope that he addresses some of the questions I raised.
Fifty years ago today, 2001: A Space Odyssey was all the buzz, and I was preparing to see it within days on a spectacular screen at the Loew’s State Theater in St. Louis. The memory of that first viewing will always be bright, but now we have seasoned perspective from Centauri Dreams regular Al Jackson, working with Bob Mahoney and Jon Rogers, to put the film in perspective. The author of numerous scientific papers, Al’s service to the space program included his time on the Lunar Module Simulator for Apollo, described below, and his many years at Johnson Space Center, mostly for Lockheed working the Shuttle and ISS programs. But let me get to Al’s foreword — I’ll introduce Bob Mahoney and Jon Rogers within the text in the caption to their photos. Interest in 2001 is as robust as ever — be aware that a new 513-page book about the film is about to be published. It’s Michael Benson’s Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece. Let’s now return to the magic of Kubrick’s great film.
By Al Jackson, Bob Mahoney and Jon Rogers
Foreword
By the 1st of April, 1968 I had been working in the Apollo program as an astronaut trainer for the Lunar Mission Simulator, LMS, for 2 and a half years. I had also been a science fiction fan for 15 years at that time, so I had kept up with, as best as one could, Stanley Kubrick’s production of 2001: A Space Odyssey. The film premiered in Washington, DC on April 2, 1968 (it had an earlier test showing in New York). I think it premiered in Houston on a Friday, April 5 (a day after the Martin Luther King assassination). Boy! I sure tried to wangle a ticket for that but could not. However I did see the film on April 6, at the Windsor Theater in Houston on a gorgeous 70mm Cinerama screen. It was a stunning film since I had been nuts about space flight since I was 10 years old. A transcendental moment! A few things:
(1) Having read everything Arthur C. Clarke had written, I grasped essence of the story the first time through. I saw the film six more times at the Windsor in 1968, and once in March of 1969 on another big screen in Houston. That was the last time I have seen it in true 70mm. All was confirmed when I read Clarke’s novel a few weeks later.
(2) On Monday morning, the 8th of April, 1968 Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were scheduled in the LMS for training. I remember James Lovell, Bill Anders and Fred Haise standing around the coffee pot talking to Buzz. He surprised me by holding forth on how 2001’s narrative seemed to him a rework of ideas by Clarke in Childhood’s End, as well as Clarke’s thoughts in essays. In all the time he spent in the simulator, I don’t think we ever talked science fiction.
(3) Having been ’embedded’ in space flight first as a ‘space cadet’ and then plunged, as a NASA civil servant, into the whirlwind that was Apollo, I had a jaundiced eye for manned space flight. I was thrilled to see a nuclear powered exploration spacecraft, a monstrous space station and a huge base on the Moon, all technically realizable in 30 or so years. But I was getting pretty seasoned on the realities of manned spaceflight, so a little voice in the back of my brain said No Way, No How is that going to be there in 30 years. It all passed into an alternate universe in 2001. Yet I didn’t imagine that no manned flight would go out of low Earth orbit in 50 years!
Half a Century of 2001
April of 2018 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the release of Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke’s science fiction film 2001: A Space Odyssey and the novel of the same name. The narrative structure of the film is a transcendent philosophical meditation on extraterrestrial civilizations and biological evolution, a theme known in science fiction prose from H.G. Wells to the present as BIG THINKS. Books, articles, and even doctoral dissertations have been written about the film. Framing these deeper speculations was a ‘future history’ constructed on a foundation of rigorously researched, then-current scientific and engineering knowledge. We address this technology backdrop and assess its accuracy. We’ll leave any commentary on the film’s philosophy to film critics and buffs.
Hailed at the time as a bold vision of our future in space, it presented both Kubrick’s and. Clarke’s predictions of spaceflight three decades beyond the then-current events of the Gemini and early Apollo programs. One’s impression now is that Kubrick and Clarke were overly optimistic. We certainly don’t have 1000-foot diameter space stations (the one shown in the film was SS Five; we never see the other four) spinning in Earth orbit and multiple large bases on the lunar surface supporting hundreds of people. And the Galileo and Cassini probes were a far cry from nuclear-powered manned missions to the outer planets.
But those extrapolations are programmatic in nature, not technology-related. One must recall that the film was conceived in early 1965, when the space programs of both the U.S. and U.S.S.R. were racing ahead at full speed. Prose science fiction of the late 1930’s through 1965 is an indicator that many writers assumed extensive spaceflight exploits were perfectly feasible (even inevitable) by the turn of the last century. (It should be noted that many prose science fiction writers such as Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, and many others, hedged their bets and put the technological developments depicted in the film more than 100 years beyond 2001.) The many social ,economic and political circumstances that would place pressures on space program funding were not fully understood at the film’s production. This was also at a time when individual countries unilaterally pursued their own space programs.
Yet when one looks beyond the obvious programmatic “overshoot” of the film to the technical and operational details of their portrayal of spaceflight, Kubrick and Clarke’s cinematic glance into the crystal ball seems much more remarkable. There are few sources of technical material about the spacecraft in the film although we know that Marshall engineers Frederick Ordway and Harry Lange (7,8), spent nearly three years designing the technical details for the film with the help of both the American and British aerospace industries. Their considerable efforts are evident even down to the details.
Image: Discovery in Jupiter space. Credit: Jon Rogers.
Space Transport to Earth Orbit
Take the Orion III space plane. Excluding the Pan Am logo (no one would have expected Pan Am to go bankrupt only 15 years later!), the space plane ferrying Dr. Floyd into Earth orbit shares an amazing number of features with the once active space plane, the Space Shuttle. Not only does it have a double-delta wing, but the three sweep angles (both leading and trailing edges) are within 10 degrees of those on NASA’s shuttle. One also finds it intriguing (as superficial a matter as this might be) that the back ends of both vehicles have double bulges to accommodate their propulsion systems.
Watching the docking sequence cockpit view in the film is like sitting in the flight engineer’s seat on a shuttle’s flight deck. Three primary computer screens, data meters spanning the panel over the windshield, a computer system by IBM, dynamic graphics of the docking profile can be found in the Orbiters. The real Shuttle approaches not nose-first but top-first, and the dynamic images of space station approaches are displayed on laptop computers, not the primary computer screens. The laptop imagery in the Shuttles was due to the evolution in computer technology, which did not exist when the 2001 space planes were conceived.
Another implied technical feature of the Orion III docking operation is that the space plane’s crew is not doing the flying; the space plane’s computers are. While this isn’t quite the way the Shuttle docked to the space station today (the crews flew most of the approach and docking manually but their stick and engine-firing commands pass through the computers), fully automatic dockings have been the norm for Russian Soyuz and Progress for many years and for the ESA Automated Transfer Vehicle. The premise of the space plane flying itself as the crew monitors its progress was standard operating procedure for Shuttle ascents and entry.
Speaking of ascent, the film leaves us to speculate on how the Orion III achieved orbit. The book 2001: A Space Odyssey [1] fills this in—and here we find a serious divergence from the stage-and-a-half vertically launched shuttle. It is now known that the Orion III was a ‘III’ because the first stage, Orion I, was the booster (while Orion II was a cargo carrier [2a] (see note 1)]. In the novel, Clarke clearly describes the Orion space liner configuration as a piggy-back Two-Stage-to-Orbit (TSTO), Horizontal Take Off and Horizontal Landing (HTOHL) tandem vehicle launched on some form of railed accelerator sled [2a].
Image: Orion 1 and 3 mated for flight. Credit: Ian Walsh, who in addition to being a key player in designing and building the largest aperture telescope in the southwest of England is also a builder of scale models both factual and fictional.
This mid-60’s speculation for an ascent/entry transportation system is remarkably in line with (minus the rail sled) many of the European Space Agency’s extensive ’80s/’90s design studies of their Sänger II/Horus-3b shuttle [9]. (A multitude of TSTO studies in the Future European Space Transportation Investigations Programme [9] echoed the space transportation system suggested in the film 2001.) Perhaps Clarke’s prescience (and ESA’s design inspiration) stemmed not from looking forward but from looking back. Amazingly, basic physics had guided Eugen Sänger and Irene Brent—in 1938!—to define this fundamental configuration (including the rail sled) for their proposed ‘orbital space plane’ the Silbervogel.
Image: The 2001 space plane going for orbit. Credit: Jon Rogers.
It is interesting that Arthur C. Clarke wrote a novel in 1947, Prelude to Space, with a horizontal take off two-stage-to-orbit spacecraft and twenty one years later it was depicted, though one has to read the novel to find this out. The second stage in Prelude to Space is nuclear powered while the Orion III is liquid oxygen-liquid hydrogen propulsion.
In recent times it was noticed that there was another shuttle to space station V, the Russian ‘Titov’, but it can only be seen inside an office on the station.
Image: Model of the Russian Titov shuttle, a tough catch unless you’re watching the movie extremely closely. Credit: Ian Walsh.
Zero G
One of the best aspects of 2001, and certainly a significant reason most knowledgeable space enthusiasts admire it, is its artistic use of true physics. Nearly every spaceflight scene shown in 2001 conforms to the way the real universe works. (And talk about a compliment to the special effects crew of the 1968 film — the Apollo 13 team achieved most of their zero-g effects by filming inside the NASA KC-135 training aircraft as it flew parabolic arcs.) 2001 has had a lasting influence on using facts in the story telling: in recent years, Gravity, Interstellar and The Martian used reality as a canvas.
If you are in an orbiting spacecraft that’s not undergoing continuous acceleration due to its own propulsion, you can’t just walk around like you’re heading into the kitchen from the living room. Those bastions of “science” fiction pop culture, Star Trek and Star Wars, conveniently used an old prose science fiction ploy, ‘super-science’ ‘field-effect’ gravity, to permit walking (due to F/X budgets or artistic license ). However, careful comparison of the 1968 film scenes to those of crew members operating in spacecraft today quickly reveals that Kubrick dealt with the technical (and potentially F/X-budget-busting) challenge of faking zero gravity by blending scientifically legitimate speculation, real physics on the soundstage, and a touch of artistic license that collectively helped to produce visually compelling aesthetics.
In 2001, when the crew move about in non-rotating parts of their spacecraft, they walk (and even climb up and down ladders) on Velcro (or some similar material) with special footwear. We first see this in the Orion III ‘shuttle’, when a stewardess walks in zero g using grip-shoes. In fact, one of the more visually interesting sequences (the stewardess heading up to the cockpit in the Aries IB moon shuttle) gains its impact with the idea — the stewardess calmly walks her way up a curving wall until she’s upside down. Station astronauts must fidget anxiously when they watch this scene since they would accomplish a similar trip today in seconds with just a few pushes. In today’s spacecraft, you don’t walk anywhere; you float.
DCF 1.0
Image: Jon Rogers on the right, with Jack Hagerty, who along with Ian Walsh added comments and suggestions for this essay. Some background on Jon Rogers: An A.I.A.A. member for many years, Jon started his career as QA inspector on Apollo Hi-Gain antenna system, built microcircuits for the Space Shuttles, and was Sr. Mfg. Engineer on the GOES, INTELSAT-V, SCS1-4 Satellites. Mr. Rogers has written articles, co-authored/illustrated the Spaceship Handbook, and presented to the A.A.S. national convention, on the early history of spaceships. He received his degree from SJSU in 2000. Credit: Al Jackson.
Kubrick adopted the concept (not necessarily an unreasonable one for the mid-60s) that routine space flyers would insist on retaining the norms of earth operations, including walking, while in zero gravity. (In fact, most crewmembers do prefer at least a visual sense of a consistent up-and-down in spacecraft cabins.) While this helped him out of a major cinematic challenge, it predated the early 70’s Skylab program, when astronauts finally had enough room to really move around and learn the true freedom of zero gravity. You’ll note too that the flight attendant’s cushioned headgear also helped avoid the likely impossible task of cinematically creating freely floating long hair, a common sight in today’s downlink video.
2001 was probably the first space flight film to actually use zero g to depict zero g. In the scene where astronaut Dave Bowman re-enters the Discovery through the emergency hatch, the movie set was built vertically. This allowed actor Keir Dullea to be dropped, and thus undergo a second or two of freefall, before the wire harness arrested his plunge. (Note 5)
Of course, today’s space flyers use velcro to secure just about everything else. Cameras, checklists, pens, food containers — you can tell the space items apart from their earthbound cousins by their extensive strips of fuzzy tape. Unfortunately, this convenient fastener’s days in the space program may be numbered for long-duration flight. Velcro, composed of tiny plastic hooks, eventually wears out and small pieces break off and can become airborne hazards to equipment and crew. Consequently, long-stay crews keep equipment and themselves in place with other fastening techniques: Magnets, bungee cords, plastic clips, or even just simple foot straps.
Image: Bob Mahoney. Passion for spaceflight propelled Bob Mahoney through bachelor’s and master’s degree programs in aerospace engineering at the University of Notre Dame and the University of Texas at Austin, respectively. Love of writing carried him into lead editorships of his high school’s literary magazine and Notre Dame Engineering’s Technical Review. Bob discovered an outlet for both of these passions while serving nearly ten years as a spaceflight instructor in the Mission Operations Directorate at Johnson Space Center. While working at JSC, he taught astronauts, flight controllers, and fellow instructors in the disciplines of orbital mechanics, computers, navigation, rendezvous, and proximity operations. His duties included development of simulation scripts for both crew-specific and mission control team training. Bob supported many missions, including STS 35, the first flight of Spacelab post-Challenger, and STS 71, the first shuttle docking to Mir. As Lead Rendezvous Instructor for STS 63, the first shuttle-Mir. rendezvous, and STS 80, the first dual free-flyer deploy-and-retrieve, he ensured both crew and flight control team preparedness in rendezvous and proximity operations.
Artificial Gravity
Kubrick and Clarke’s other method of fighting zero g was well-established in the literature of the time: centrifugal force. The physiological effects of zero g on humans had been a worry from the early days of theoretical thinking about spaceflight. Some thought it might be beneficial, but many worried that since the human body evolved in one g, long exposure to no or reduced gravity might be detrimental. In the film, both the large space station orbiting Earth and the habitation deck of the Jupiter mission’s Discovery spacecraft rotate to create artificial gravity for the inhabitants. While Gemini 11 achieved this during an experiment, the general trend in space operations has been to live with zero gravity (properly termed microgravity) while combating its effects on the human body through exercise. This path was chosen for two reasons: A rotating spacecraft’s structure must be significantly sturdier (and thus more massive, and thus more expensive to launch) to handle the stresses of spinning, and the utility of zero g seems to outweigh its negative aspects. Yet one must note that research on the ISS has indicated there are limits to how much exercise and other similar countermeasures can counteract physical deterioration. Living in zero g for extended periods of time, for interplanetary flight, now no longer seems possible. This is one aspect of space medicine research that makes the ISS such an important laboratory.
Ordway and Lange designed the Discovery‘s crew quarters centrifuge realistically to simulate/generate 0.3 g while counteracting Coriolis forces, but a 300-foot diameter wheel was just not feasible as a set. Nevertheless, Vicker’s aircraft built the fully working prop with remarkable accuracy. (6) The space station interior set did not rotate, but consisted of a fixed curved structure nearly 300 feet long and nearly 40 feet high. (2) The curve was gentle enough to permit the actors to walk smoothly down the sloping floor and maintain the desired illusion.
Food
A bit of a miss here, more dictated by the design of ‘space food’ in the 1960s than anything else. Whereas the Council of Astronautics’ Chief Heywood Floyd sips liquid peas and carrots through straws on the way to the Moon and the Jupiter-bound Discovery crew eats what could best be described as colored paste, today’s astronauts get to eat shrimp cocktail and Thanksgiving turkey dinners. Of course, these are either dehydrated or military-style MREs (Meals Ready to Eat), but they beat the zero-g mess problem simply by being sticky via sauce or gravy. The most accurate culinary prediction of Kubrick and Clarke was the lunar shuttle bus meal: sandwiches. However, when an ISS crewmember prepares that old staple peanut butter and jelly, he or she uses tortillas in place of bread. Like worn-out Velcro, bread makes too many crumbs, and crumbs can get into the electronics.
The galley on Discovery, however, has its counterpart on the Shuttle. While it didn’t automatically dole out an entire five-course meal based on crewmember selection (astronauts did this manually before liftoff back in Houston, and then their meals get packed in storage lockers), the shuttle galley did let them heat up items that are supposed to be hot and rehydrate that shrimp cocktail. The zero-gravity toilet instructions shown in the film, an intentional Kubrick joke, are much longer than the shuttle’s Waste Containment System crew checklist.
Propulsion
While the Orion III space plane’s external propulsion elements hint at systems a few years beyond even today’s state-of-the-art (possible air intakes for a scramjet and a sloping aerospike-like exhaust nozzle), the spherical Aries 1B moon shuttle has rocket nozzles which would look perfectly at home on the old lunar module. Kubrick was smart not to show exhaust as they fired, only lunar dust being blown off the lunar surface landing pad. Ordway has indicated that the propellants were LOX/LH2 and thus the exhaust would be extremely difficult to see in a vacuum in sunlight. Even the MMH/N2O4 shuttle jet firings washed out during orbital day.
One particular propulsion depiction potentially unique to 2001, which Kubrick likely used more for cinematic aesthetics as well for the sake of realism, is the roar, whine, or boom of engines in the space vacuum. Even Apollo 13 fell down here, going for the rock ‘n’ roll excitement of the service module’s jets pounding away with bangs and rumbles in external views. (Arguably Kubrick’s most inspired move ever was to overlay Johann Strauss’s ‘The Blue Danube’.) Something that almost all fictional space TV and movies miss is the cabin noise of those jets firing, however. Unlike the vacuum outside, a spacecraft’s structure can carry sound and the Shuttle crews do hear their jet firings; at least the ones up front near the cabin. They are quite loud — crewmembers have compared them to howitzers going off. (The 2013 film Gravity did use ‘interior’ sounds well, subtle enough that one does not catch it at first. Sounds transmitted through space suits and ship structures, and a clever use of the vacuum!)
2001‘s one big cinematic overshoot propulsion-wise is the nuclear rockets of the interplanetary Discovery. While deep-space probes such as Voyager, Galileo, and Cassini employ RTG units to generate electricity with the radioactive heat of their plutonium, no nuclear propulsion has ever flown in space to date, primarily because there has been no return to research on nuclear propulsion. (Note: The U.S. NERVA nuclear thermal rocket program was not canceled until 1972, a full four years after the movie’s release.)
The Discovery was powered by a gaseous fission reactor for rocket propulsion. The highest reactor core temperature in a nuclear rocket can be achieved by using gaseous fissionable material. In the gas-core rocket concept, radiant energy is transferred from a high-temperature fissioning plasma to a hydrogen propellant. In this concept, the propellant temperature can be significantly higher than the engine structural temperature.
Regarding the depiction of that nuclear propulsion in the film, Discovery was actually missing a major component: massive thermal radiators. As any nuclear engineer could point out (and described properly in the novel), these huge panels would have dominated the otherwise vertebrae-like Discovery‘s structure like giant butterfly wings. Even the decidedly non-nuclear fuel-cell-powered Shuttle and solar-cell-powered ISS sport sizable radiators to dump the heat of their electricity-powered hardware. Ordway and Lange were quite aware of the need for such radiators and appropriate models were built, but in the end aesthetics carried the day, so the cinematic Discovery coasted along (silently) somewhat sleeker than known physics demanded. (One interesting tidbit here: some Glenn Research Center engineers redesigned the Discovery recently as an engineering exercise.(10))
Image Credit: Jon Rogers.
Cabin Interior
Speaking of sound, 2001 may be the only fictional film to convey the significant background noise in a spacecraft cabin. Every interior scene in Discovery is colored with a background hum, most certainly meant to be the many spacecraft systems running continuously, including air circulation fans. Crews have reported that the Shuttle cabin is a very noisy workplace, and some portions of ISS were once rumored to merit earplugs.
As already noted, the Orion III cockpit is remarkably similar to the Shuttle cockpit. One notes that all of the cockpits in the film are “glass” cockpits, where all information is displayed on computer screens (versus the dials and meters typical of 1960s technology). But this time it was the real-world Shuttles that caught up with the film (and a significant portion of the world’s airliners). During the 1990s the orbiter’s cockpit displays (including many 1972-era dials and meters) were entirely replaced with glass-cockpit technology.
Hibernation
Nope. Still can’t do that today. Suspended animation is an old story device in prose science fiction, not seen as much these days. About the only progress there is therapeutic hypothermia which may be a step towards ‘hypersleep’.
In fact, the Salyut, Mir, and ISS programs were geared toward keeping crew members active for longer and longer durations, not asleep. The concept of conservation of crew supplies is reasonable enough, but even in 1968 multiyear missions did envision years-long expeditions with enough self-contained logistical support. The sleep stations shown on Discovery, however, appear to offer crewmembers the same small volume as those on the Shuttle or ISS.
Communications
This is a technology that really tends to hide behind the flashier and more obvious equipment but is so critical that it should never be taken for granted. Unfortunately, by using it as a device serving the subplot involving HAL and the Discovery crew, Kubrick and Clarke committed a serious misstep in predicting the technology of today — er, yesterday. If you recall, the first sign of HAL’s neurosis is his false report that the AE-35 unit (the electronic black box responsible for keeping Discovery‘s antennae suite pointed at Earth) is going to fail. Mission Commander Dave Bowman must take a spacewalk to haul it inside after replacing it with a substitute. After finding nothing wrong with it, the crew (acting on the ominous suggestion of the erroneous HAL computer) decides to put the original unit back.
Here’s the problem: a system as critical as the communications pointing system would not have a single-point failure, especially in a manned spacecraft flying all the way to Jupiter! In fact, a Shuttle launch was scrubbed because one of two communications black boxes was not working properly. The Shuttle was designed with fail-operational fail-safe redundancy. In other words, if a critical unit fails, the shuttle can still support mission operations. If a second, similar unit fails, the shuttle can get home safely. Realistically, such a failure in a sophisticated Jupiter-bound manned spacecraft would call for simple rerouting of the commands through a backup unit, with at least one more unit waiting in reserve beyond that. This wouldn’t be a very dramatic turn, but such a sequence would better parallel the occasional Shuttle and ISS systems failures that have thus far been irritating but not showstoppers. (Of course, not all those many years ago Mir lost all attitude control when its one computer failed, so perhaps the premise isn’t too far fetched…) Once again, though, this technical ‘glitch’ was dictated by the cinematic narrative. Is it not interesting, however, that our premier unmanned Jupiter probe, Galileo, suffered a crippling failure of its primary communications antenna?
On the spinning space station, Dr. Floyd makes an AT&T videophone call to his daughter. Today’s space station inhabitants do, in fact, converse with their families over a video link, but it’s reasonably certain that their calls don’t cost $1.70 and get charged to their calling cards.
Spacesuits & EVA
This is the issue wherein 2010, that bastard child, really makes “hard” science fiction fans hang their heads low. 2001 presented spacesuits (especially those on the Jupiter mission) that were sophisticated, logical in design, quite impressive in capability, and perfectly believable for an advanced space program. 2010‘s American spacesuits look like they rolled off the EMU rack at Johnson Space Center!
The single component of the 2001 suits worn by Dave Bowman and Frank Poole most analogous to the EMUs today is the built-in jet maneuvering pack. Small, unobtrusive, minimal — that pretty much sums up the SAFER unit developed for station EVA. The 2001 suit does reflect the modularity concept of the Shuttle-era suit as well: helmet and gloves attach to the main suit with ring seals, but Ordway and Lange did not anticipate the move towards “hard shell” design (the American suit’s rigid torso, the Russian back-door-entry Orlan). The cinematic suits appear much more akin to the old Mercury and Gemini configurations, or even the recent advanced design of Dr. Dava Newman at MIT. (Note 3)
One notes there is a glaring design failure in the Discovery EVA suits. There is an external oxygen hose from helmet to backpack. This does not exist in Harry Lange’s initial suit designs and that hose does not exist on Heywood Floyd’s suit and the other suits on the visit to the Lunar Monolith. It was a bit of cinematic drama that could have been taken care of with a suit tear, a rare oversight by Kubrick. Real space suits just don’t have a vulnerable oxygen supply tube from the backpack EMS unit to the suit helmet (we see Frank Poole fighting to reattach his). Even in 1965 Apollo space suits had much more secure fittings.
While not a matter of technical prognostication, we can’t help but mention that the EVAs shown in 2001 remain the most realistic fictional depiction of spacewalking ever put on film. (That is, until the 2013 film Gravity.) The fluidity of motion and the free-floating grace of the crewmembers as they move completely in line with real physical laws is nearly identical to what you see downlinked on NASA TV. Not impressed? Compare Bowman’s approach and arrival at the Discovery‘s antenna in 2001. How’d Kubrick pull it off? Skilled stuntmen suspended from cables filmed from below—that was the key. Filming at high speed and then slowing the footage for incorporation in the film also helped. (In Apollo 13 extensive use was made of flying parabolic arcs in a Boeing KC-135 — that was real zero g. Alfonso Cuarón used ‘motion capture’ and computer generated imagery in Gravity.
One EVA item in 2001 that today’s engineers and astronauts would love to have but don’t is the space pod: that ball of a spacecraft with the pair of multi-jointed arms out front. Such a vehicle would eliminate the need for some suited EVAs (the crewmember could just stay inside the pod) and would make others much easier (since the pod, under the control of the ship’s highly intelligent computer, could help out). But if you think about it, we’re really not too far off with the Shuttle and ISS remote manipulator systems (the Canadarms) These now (especially with the recent addition of DEXTRE with its two multi-jointed arms) permit the accomplishment of some tasks outside the spacecraft without EVA, and they have proven themselves capable EVA assistants under the control of a highly intelligent computer—namely, a crew member back inside the spacecraft cabin!
The most glaring difference in EVA, however, lies in protocol. During the EVAs in 2001, a single crewmember conducts the EVA. This is just not done today. Both Americans and Russians always leave their spacecraft in pairs (and in rare circumstances, as a trio) for safety’s sake — if one crewmember gets in trouble the other can come immediately to their aid. However, practically speaking, both crew members did have a companion: HAL the computer, controlling the space pod. But, of course, the solo EVA, the single-point communications failure necessitating the EVA, and HAL’s control of the space pod, collectively set up the greatest drama in the film: HAL trying to kill off all his crewmates.
Image Credit: Jon Rogers.
Artificial Intelligence
Given the many different levels at which the space program (and society as a whole) use computers today, it is within this niche that the film’s accuracy is most difficult to gauge.
Certainly, we have computers that can talk, and Shuttle and station crews have experimented with voice-activated controls of some systems, but these are superficial similarities. More importantly, we find a better comparison in the command and control realm: during large portions of a Shuttle’s mission, the fail-operational fail-safe primary & backup computer suite of five GPC computers did control the vehicle just as HAL completely controlled Discovery. (In fact, as a particularly curious side note, the programming language for the Shuttle’s primary computers is actually termed HAL/S, for Higher Assembler Language/Shuttle, but this just might be a not-so-subtle homage to the film by the software development team.) Unlike a lot of prose science fiction, 2001 did anticipate flat screen TVs and what seem to be IPADs!
The film was created at a point in history when the computer’s invasion of our society (including spaceflight) might have taken one of two paths: bigger and more powerful mainframe computers that would interface everywhere through an extensive but centrally controlled communications network, OR smaller and smaller special-purpose computers that each would do a little bit of the work. HAL certainly represents the pinnacle of achievement for the former — an artificial intelligence that had control of every single aspect of the Discovery‘s operations. The distributed PC network controlling the ISS today reflects the latter.
Yet the depiction of the HAL 9000 (Heuristically programmed Algorithmic Computer) in 2001 remains one of the film’s most eerie elements. For their description of artificial intelligence, Kubrick and Clarke only had the terminology and the vision of the mid-1960’s as their guide. At that time the prevailing concept expected ‘AI’ to be a programmed computer. Thus the term ‘computer’, with all its implications of being a machine, occurs repeatedly.
But in the last 50 years no true ‘strong’ AI has emerged. Today’s corresponding term would be ‘strong AI’ (11); their use of mid-1960’s terminology obscures the fact that Kubrick constructed an AI that is unmistakably ‘strong’, that is, capable of “general intelligent action.” How this would have been achieved Kubrick and Clarke left to the imagination of the viewer and the reader.
As HAL seems to be a ‘strong AI’, capable of feeling, independent thought, emotions, and almost all attributes of human intelligence, anyone viewing the film today should forget the film’s and novel’s use of the terms ‘computer ‘and ‘programming’. HAL seemed able to reason, use strategy, solve puzzles, make judgments understand uncertainty, represent knowledge including common-sense knowledge, plan, learn, communicate in natural language, perceive and especially see, have social intelligence, be able to move and manipulate objects (robotics), and integrate all these skills toward common goals. These attributes are possible not through programming as much as through ‘evolving’ or ‘growing-learning’ … a ‘solid-state intelligence’. That is why it is amazing to watch the film today (despite its use of clunky, ill-suited words like computer and program) and realize that HAL was a TRUE AI. HAL likely will exist in a universe which we have yet to realize, but one has no idea when! (See note 4.)
Some Reverse Engineering
From the moment we meet HAL we are given to believe that this particular AI has total control of everything in the Discovery. He can take action — open pod doors, open pod bay doors, even adjust couch cushions! — at a crewmember’s spoken word. Yet after HAL kills Frank Poole and the hibernating crewmembers followed by Dave Bowman’s return to the Discovery, what do we see? A manual, emergency airlock/entrance.
What is that doing there? Directly, to provide the film with an ‘action scene’, but the implications are deeper. Ordway/Lange of the Discovery knew their spaceships! A ship that substantial on an important mission must have redundancy; if not in the communications system, then at least to back up the onboard AI! Ordway wrote a memo to Kubrick about ship redundancy (7a). What if HAL had been ‘holed’ by a very freak meteor hit? What if an ultra-high-energy cosmic ray bored a damaging track through one of HAL’s solid state modules? Any of a number of possible unpredictable second- and third-order failures might occur, so the crew might be forced to take care of the ship and mission ‘on their own.’
And it is here, in the consideration of backup systems, where we catch Kubrick and Clarke, the storytellers, at odds with Kubrick and Clarke, the prognosticators of realistic spacecraft design. We find Bowman and Poole discussing how to partially shut HAL down by leaving only primitive functions operating. That could only be an option if the human crew could control the Discovery manually (or rather more practically, semi-manually) with a lot of help from still-working automated systems. This issue is more explicit in the movie and implicit in the film.
In fact Kubrick mildly trumps Clarke technically and dramatically in the film’s narrative structure (wherein Bowman leaves the ship to rescue Poole, setting up the emergency airlock action scene). In the novel, Clarke merely has HAL ‘blow down’ the Discovery by opening the pod bay doors. However, examining Lange and Ordway’s drawings of the Discovery‘s living quarters reveals at least two airlocks between the pod bay and the centrifuge (7,7a,8,9). Independent double and triple overrides (over which HAL had no control) would have come into play to prevent this very scenario from happening, mechanically or insane-AI-instigated.
How about HAL’s control of Dave’s pod? Actually one can capture a frame in the pod (‘N/A HAL COMLK’) that shows that Bowman, even though he left his helmet behind, had the sense to cut HAL’s control of the pod. It is impressive but not surprising that Kubrick and his team thought to include such a detail.
When Comes the Future?
While Kubrick and Clarke’s iconic 1968 vision of spaceflight’s future may have been far off the mark in terms of how much we would have accomplished by the turn of the millennium, its accurate anticipation of so many operational and technological details remains a fitting testament to the engineering talent of their supporting players, especially Fred Ordway and Harry Lange. The astounding prescience in their projections of the specifics of space operations decades beyond the then-current real spaceflight of Gemini and Apollo, even when constrained by storytelling aesthetics, offers the promise that their spectacular rendering of a spacefaring society may still come to pass.
With the United States and other nations now finally developing systems to return human crews to the Moon and enable travel beyond, and with commercial entities actively pursuing private spaceflight across a spectrum of opportunities long considered a matter of fantasy, perhaps we can take heart in the possibility that by the time another fifty years have passed, Kubrick and Clarke’s brilliant, expansive, and yet convincingly authentic future may finally become real in both its details and its scope.
Selected Bibliography
(1) 2001: A Space Odyssey, by Arthur C. Clarke, based on a screenplay by Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke. Copyright 1968. The New American Library, Inc.
(2) The Making of Kubrick’s 2001, edited by Jerome Agel. Copyright 1970 The Agel Publishing Company, Inc. The New American Library, Inc.
(4) The Lost Worlds of 2001, by Arthur C. Clarke. Copyright 1972. The New American Library, Inc.
(5) The Odyssey File, by Arthur C. Clarke and Peter Hyams. Copyright 1984. Ballantine Books.
(6) “2001: A Space Odyssey,” F.I. Ordway, Spaceflight, Vol. 12, No. 3, Mar. 1970, pp. 110-117. (Publisher: The British Interplanetary Society).
(7) Part B: 2001: A Space Odyssey in Retrospect, Frederick I Ordway, III Volume 5, and American Astronautical Society History Series, Science Fiction and Space Futures: Past and Present, F.I. Ordway, Edited by Eugene M. Emme, 1982, pages 47 – 105. (ISBN 0-87703-173-8).
(11) The film 2001: A Space Odyssey, premiere date April 6 1968.
Notes
(1) Acknowledgments: Thanks to Ian Walsh, Jack Hagerty and Wes Kelly , personal communications. Also, Special thanks to Douglas Yazell and the Houston section of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics for hosting the first edition of this article in 2008.
(2) In the mid 1960’s many of the SETI pioneers were afraid that revelation of the existence of an advanced extraterrestrial civilization might cause a social disruption; many others disagreed with this. Kubrick and Clarke decided to keep this as a plot device.
(3) There is an amusing bit of homage to George Pal in the film. In the 1950 movie the commander’s suit is red, the 2nd in command has a yellow one, all the rest are blue. Same is true in 2001! [8]
(4) The novel 2010 explains HAL’s ‘insanity’ in terms of his keeping the discovery of the TMA-1 monolith a secret for reasons of national security. (note 2) (Whatever that means.) This contradiction against his programming to never report erroneous information created a “Hofstadter-Moebius loop,” which reduced HAL to paranoia. Since nothing explicit is presented in the original film, and taking the characterization of HAL as a strong AI (for all intents and purposes making him ‘human’), HAL could have just as well gone bonkers for no good reason at all!
(5) A technical point about the emergency entry into the Discovery. Where did the pod hatch go? One notes that the pod doors slide ‘transversely’, i.e., they don’t swing in or out. In the airlock entrance scene Dave launches himself from ‘frame right’; normally the pod door slides open toward frame right (we’re seeing the rear of the pod in the scene). Thus the door’s guide track ran on both sides of the pod’s hatchway. Thus the normal open/close mechanism wouldn’t have to be retracted out of the way in an emergency. The pyros would be on the attach points where the door joins the mechanism, and in an emergency they’d blow the door further around the track, i.e., ‘frame left’, out of the way, while the regular mechanism stays put. (Thanks to Jack Hagerty for this observation.)
(6) 2018 is also the 30th anniversary of the viable ‘traversable wormhole’ by Morris and Thorne, this gives the ‘Star Gate’ in 2001 some physics which it did not have in 1968. M. S. Morris and K. S. Thorne, “Wormholes in spacetime and their use for interstellar travel: A tool for teaching General Relativity”, Am. J. Phys. 56, 395 (1988).
The Tau Zero Foundation and Centauri Dreams congratulates team Space Exploration Technologies, for the successful, historic, pioneering test flight of the Falcon Heavy.
Ad Astra Incrementis indeed!
From all of us,
Jeff Greason
Marc Millis
Rhonda Stevenson
Andrew Aldrin
Paul Gilster
Bill Tauskey
Rod Pyle
In Centauri Dreams, Paul Gilster looks at peer-reviewed research on deep space exploration, with an eye toward interstellar possibilities. For many years this site coordinated its efforts with the Tau Zero Foundation. It now serves as an independent forum for deep space news and ideas. In the logo above, the leftmost star is Alpha Centauri, a triple system closer than any other star, and a primary target for early interstellar probes. To its right is Beta Centauri (not a part of the Alpha Centauri system), with Beta, Gamma, Delta and Epsilon Crucis, stars in the Southern Cross, visible at the far right (image courtesy of Marco Lorenzi).
If you'd like to submit a comment for possible publication on Centauri Dreams, I will be glad to consider it. The primary criterion is that comments contribute meaningfully to the debate. Among other criteria for selection: Comments must be on topic, directly related to the post in question, must use appropriate language, and must not be abusive to others. Civility counts. In addition, a valid email address is required for a comment to be considered. Centauri Dreams is emphatically not a soapbox for political or religious views submitted by individuals or organizations. A long form of the policy can be viewed on the Administrative page. The short form is this: If your comment is not on topic and respectful to others, I'm probably not going to run it.
